Filipino Contemporary Art · Manila
Where the saints became screens,
and the poor became pixels.
Celestine Almendras · Binondo Studio · 2024
About the Artist
Celestine Almendras was born in Tondo, Manila in 1989, the daughter of a fish vendor and a retired church organist. She studied Fine Arts at the University of Santo Tomas before completing a residency at the Liverpool Biennial in 2015, where she began fusing Social Realism with surrealist iconography drawn from Philippine folk Catholicism.
Her canvases are uncompromising documents of a society in metamorphosis — figures caught between devotion and transaction, between the sacred and the algorithmic. She paints with a quiet ferocity, as if every image is both a confession and an accusation.
Almendras currently maintains her studio in Binondo. Her works are held in private collections across Manila, Singapore, and New York.
Artist Statement
I paint the place where the sacred and the mundane eat from the same plate. In the Philippines, the santo and the smartphone exist in the same pocket — both are objects of desire, both promise salvation, both can be lost.
My work is not nostalgia. I am documenting the texture of a country that has learned to survive by holding contradictions with tremendous grace — and tremendous cost.
Every jeepney I paint is also a cathedral. Every laborer’s hand is also a saint’s hand. I want collectors to feel the weight of that equivalence, and then ask themselves who assigned the different price tags.
Selected Works
2019–2024 · Oil, Acrylic, Mixed Media
A decommissioned jeepney throne draped in sampaguita garlands, its driver rendered as a hollow saint. The last route number reads zero.
₱ 680,000 — Available
A Filipina domestic worker holds a phone to her ear — on-screen, her child’s face dissolves into a QR code. Distance as devotion.
Sold — Private Collection, Singapore
The Virgin is crowned not with stars but with loan receipts. Her expression is exhausted, enduring, and entirely familiar.
₱ 420,000 — Available
A McMansion rises behind a nipa hut still bearing its last typhoon wound. Both rooftops catch the same rain.
Sold — Private Collection, Manila
Offerings of fruit and rice arranged before a glowing server rack, as if the algorithm were the newest patron saint of labor.
₱ 380,000 — Available
Twelve figures in the Trapo family pew. Every phone glows. The priest’s face is the only one unlit, and the only one afraid.
Sold — Private Collection, New York
Three children sleep on a bancayan, each dreaming a different version of the same highway — one lit, one gridlocked, one underwater.
Sold — National Art Collection, Manila
A tourist photo of a rural scene being taken inside another photograph, infinitely — until the original is nowhere to be found.
₱ 310,000 — Available
An OFW walks through an airport with her family home balanced on her head. The house is enormous. She is not struggling.
Sold — Private Collection, Makati
The Infant Jesus wears a delivery rider’s helmet. His orb has been replaced with a five-star rating. His cape is a thermal bag.
₱ 295,000 — Available
A colonial master’s portrait — the subject is a Tondo teenager, his basketball and court shoes visible beneath the Renaissance drapery.
Sold — Private Collection, Hong Kong
A field of cogon grass catches fire — from the flames, hands reach upward, neither asking to be saved nor accepting it, just acknowledging the heat.
Sold — Private Collection, Singapore
Available Works
Select original works available for private purchase. All inquiries handled personally.
Litany for the Last Jeepney
2024 · Oil on canvas · 180 × 240 cm
Birhen ng Bayad Utang
2023 · Oil on wood panel · 90 × 120 cm
Alay sa Data Center
2023 · Mixed media on canvas · 100 × 130 cm
Simulacra ng Probinsya
2021 · Acrylic on raw linen · 120 × 180 cm
Santo Niño de Gig Economy
2020 · Mixed media, resin, gold leaf · 80 × 100 cm
All available works include certificate of authenticity and provenance documentation.
Exhibition History
2024
Between the Blessed and the Broadband
Silverlens Galleries, Makati, Manila
Solo Exhibition
2023
Southeast Asian Futures
National Gallery Singapore
Group Exhibition
2022
The Weight of Distance
Finale Art File, San Antonio Village, Manila
Solo Exhibition
2021
New Mythologies of the Pacific
Ayala Museum, Makati City
Group Exhibition · Invited Artist
2015
Liverpool Biennial International Residency
Tate Liverpool, United Kingdom
International Residency · Group Showing
Inquire
Private viewings and acquisition inquiries welcome.
Serious inquiries only. Private viewings available upon request.