David Medalla’s work has been the subject of several major retrospectives in recent years, including exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Museion, Bolzano; and Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn. His work is held in major museum collections worldwide, including M+, Hong Kong; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; MAMCO, Geneva; and the National Gallery Singapore.

David Medalla (Manila, 1938–2020) developed a polymorphic and experimental practice over more than six decades, spanning kinetic art, participatory performance, ephemeral works, painting, drawing, and installation. From the beginning, his work resisted fixed categories and conventional notions of the artwork as a stable, autonomous object. The breadth and freedom of his practice have influenced several generations of artists and curators. After leaving the Philippines in 1960, Medalla settled in London, where he co-founded Signals (1964–66) with Gustav Metzger and Guy Brett, an avant-garde art gallery for exeperimental and kinetic art. They exhibited kinetic artists from Europe, US and Latin America, including Mira Schendel, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Jesús Rafael Soto and Takis.

Our exhibition is built around the Sand Machine, Baguio 1 (1963–2017), at once ephemeral and endlessly in motion, and unfolds as a wandering through time and space, echoing Medalla’s own itinerant life and practice. From the late 1970s, Medalla developed his “synoptic realism,” a highly personal approach bringing together memories, friends, artists, historical figures, mythology, and political events across a variety of mediums.

Medalla continued to reactivate ideas originating in the 1960s and 1970s, treating them as ongoing processes rather than fixed historical objects. The Sand Machine (1963–2017) presented in this exhibition—consisting of a motor-driven rotating arm and beads along a thread that continuously traces and erases patterns in a bed of sand—embodies a commitment to impermanence, transformation, and long-duration experimentation. Those philosophical reflections remained fundamental throughout his career as well as his interest in ecology, interaction between humans and nature, and meditation. Always linking the wider world to the personal, Medalla also drew on childhood memories of the Philippines nature.

The exhibition brings together drawings, photographs, paintings, the sculpture, and cut-out paper masks, all of which testify to the breadth of Medalla’s practice and his inexhaustible creative energy, from his earliest years to the final days of his life.