Roberto Chabet

Roberto Chabet, widely acknowledged as a founding figure of Philippine conceptual art and one of the most influential contemporary Filipino artists, was born in 1937 in Manila, and held his first solo exhibition in 1961. A graduate of Architecture from the University of Santo Tomas, Chabet is highly regarded for his experimental works, ranging from paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, and installations made out of mostly ordinary and found material. Chabet insists on a more inclusive approach to art, a search for the sublime not just in abstract ideas but also in the immediacy of

the quotidian and the commonplace. In his works, abstraction and the everyday collide, creating spaces for new meanings.
Chabet was the founding Museum Director of The Cultural Centre of the Philippines(CCP) where he initiated the Thirteen Artist Award in 1970, a prize that supports young artists whose works show “recentness and a turning away from the past. It remains one of the most prestigious awards to be given by a national institution to a young Filipino visual artist. After his brief tenure at the CCP, Chabet led the seminal alternative artist group Shop 6, and taught for over thirty years at the University of the Philippines, College of Fine Arts and at key artist-run spaces in Manila.
Since the 70s, Chabet has been curating exhibitions of young and emerging Filipino artists. He is the recipient of the JD Rockefeller III Fund Grant (1967-1968), the Republic Cultural Heritage Award (1972), the Araw ng Maynila Award for the Visual Arts (1972), and the CCP Centennial Award of Honours for the Arts (1998).