Miguel Aquilizan
Robert Leonard looks at Miguel Aquilizan’s sculptural practice, with its surrealist mashup of foraged and repurposed items.
Image credit: Miguel Aquilizan, Mutagenesis No. 3, 2024, plastic flowers, plaster, pearls, Installation view, Platform, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2024. Photo: Joe Rukali
These days everything is sculpture, so every young artist can consider themself a sculptor. And yet, few think sculpturally, spatially – that’d be formalism, old school. Paradoxically, this makes Miguel Aquilizan a breath of fresh air. His spirit of creative adventure is palpable in the works themselves, not resting unduly on supplementary wall texts for explanation. His assemblages crackle with mixed messages and intrigues.
Aquilizan is not programmatic. He’s intuitive, improvisational, inventive. Everything comes out of making, out of play in the studio. “I use my hands to think and not my brain,” he says. Aquilizan makes art from anything to hand, grafting the made and the found; the likely and the unlikely; the raw and the cooked; metal and timber; plaster, resin and expanding foam; plastic flowers and a dead tree; furniture and ornaments.
While many of his works have an authoritative scale, they’re also ramshackle and provisional. He prefers the charm of bricolage – that stitched-together Frankenstein’s monster look – to foreground the process. However, for all their feral energy and punky attitude, his works echo familiar strategies from the art history playbook: classical, modern, ‘primitive’; busts on plinths, fragments of figures. Like Brancusi, he fashions elaborate bases, exploring the play between object and plinth.
Art runs in the family. Aquilizan was born in Manila in the Philippines in 1986 and emigrated to Brisbane with his family in 2006. These days, he splits his time between the two. His parents are the longstanding international art duo Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, famous for ... Subscribe to read all articles in full
