Aba Lluch Dalena
Sabana “Aba” Lluch Dalena is a multi-faceted Filipino artist – a visual artist, art teacher, musician, and art organizer. Dalena demonstrates her ease with wielding and spanning seemingly contradictory elements: sculpture and painting, figuration and abstraction, solitary works and collaborative pieces. Dalena held her first solo exhibition, featuring 300 terracotta sculptures of animals, at six years old back in 1978.
At 8, she held her second terra cotta sculpture show, “Pieta ni Aba”, with religious icons on the Lenten theme of the passion of Jesus Christ. At 9, she exhibited nude sculptures as well as cartoons and works on paper with painter Ely Gajo. She went on to create more works ranging from oil to mixed media, from publicly-commissioned sculptures to intensely personal paintings. She has then mounted 15 solo exhibitions of note and participated in over 50 group shows.
In her multi-media art exhibition, Trans.Form: A Survey on Love and Sexuality (2012) Dalena creates different pairs of lovers using sculptures in terra cotta or cold cast marble: an expression of Dalena’s personal belief in the enduring creed that love does not discriminate and is meant for the upliftment of everyone, regardless of differences in age, race, gender, and religion. She collaborated with German artist Lina Zacher for Batang Lumad (Children of the Soil) exhibitions in 2015 about displaced indigenous children because of mining and extra-judicial killings in Southern Philippines and spearheaded the Artists and Lawyers for Peace, Stop the Killings movement. She taught art in various schools, galleries and museums in the country and art therapy workshops in Leyte and Cebu for Yolanda survivors, and displaced Lumad families (esp. children) in Surigao del Sur.
Dalena was among the Philippine delegation in 2011 Asian International Art Exhibition held in Seoul, South Korea. She was also one of the country’s musician-representatives to the 2012 Asian International Musical Extravaganza Festival in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her solo art exhibition entitled, Fragile, was held in May 2017 at West gallery, reflecting on the state of “the human condition”. She had a two-woman show with Russian artist Eva Gorshkova entitled, “Urgent” at Conspiracy Café in Visayas avenue QC (2017), a fundraiser for Marawi and Vanities: A Time to Paint at Art Verite Gallery, Serendra, Bonifacio Global City (2018).
