Pio Abad

Born in Manila, Philippines. Living and working in Glasgow.

I see my practice as an ongoing discourse with excess: a series of attempts to mine the irrevocable links between the pompous and the primal, the ornamental and the excremental, the decadent and the delusional. Of particular interest are the idiosyncratic, if not idiotic, systems of meaning that are allowed to fester within these conditions: the calculated hegemony of totalitarian aesthetics, the anachronism within the Louis XIV style boudoirs of tropical dictators, even our own schizophrenic relationship with luxury. Offering the grotesque as a creative strategy, my work examines the function and dysfunction of excess, referencing personages who have served as its apotheosis, from the Marquis de Sade to Imelda Marcos.

glasgow school of art, glasgow, GB, painting,