David Medalla

David Medalla ( born March 23, 1942 in Manila, Philippines) is a Filipino sculptor, installation artist, concept artist, Kinetic artists and performance artists. He lives and works in London, New York City and Paris.

Life and work

David Medalla began in 1955, at the age of only 12 years studying at Columbia University in New York, on the recommendation of the American poet Mark Van Doren. He studied ancient Greek drama with Moses Hadas, modern drama with Eric Bentley, modern literature with Lionel Trilling, modern philosophy with John Herman Randall, Jr. and attended workshops for poetry at Léonie Adams.

In the late 1950s he returned to Manila and met the Catalan poet Jaime Gil de Biedma and the painter Fernando Zobel de Ayala, who were among the earliest supporters of his art.

His performance "Brother of Isidora " in 1960 in Paris at the Académie Raymond Dunca was introduced by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard.

His work has been of Harald Szeemann at the exhibition " White on White " in 1966 and "Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form " shown (1969 ) in Bern and at Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 in the Department of Individual Mythologies.

In the early 1960s, moved to London and was a co-founder of the signals Gallery in London in 1964, was exhibited in the international kinetic art. He was editor of the signals news bulletin from 1964 until 1966. In 1967 he initiated the Exploding Galaxy, an international association of multimedia artists. From 1974 to 1977 he was chairman of Artists for Democracy, an organization that had the material and cultural support to liberation movements around the world written on the flags. He was also director of the Fitzrovia Cultural Centre in London. Between 1 January 1995 and February 14, 1995 David Medalla rented a space in the Gee Street 55 in London, where he lived and exhibited. He exhibited seven new versions of its biokinetic buildings of the 1960s (a " Bubble Machine" and a monumental sand machine).

David Medalla has given lectures at the Sorbonne, at the École des Beaux -Arts in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Silliman University and the University of the Philippines at the Universities of Amsterdam and Utrecht, in the New York Public library, at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury, Warwick and Southampton in England and at the Slade School of Art

He was the founder and director of the London Biennale in 1998, a free "do- it-yourself" art festival, where inter alia the work from May Ghoussoub, Mark McGowan, Deej Fabyc, Marko Stepanov, Adam Nankervis, James Moore, Dimitri Launder, Fritz Stolberg, Salih Karya and many other artists were exhibited.

David Medalla was awarded with the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Jerome Foundation of America.

Literature and sources

• Exhibition catalog: documentation fifth survey of reality - imagery today; Catalog (as folders ) Volume 1: (material); Volume 2: ( list of exhibits ); Kassel in 1972
• Documenta Archiv (ed. ); Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive to the documenta, 1972; Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121- X