Osage Gallery is pleased to present Soft Death by Louie Cordero at Osage Soho from 16 January to 28 February 2010, following the exhibition’s debut in Osage Singapore in November last year.
Louie Cordero’s works are all filled with imageries like dismemberment, mutilation, brain, blood, intestines, membranes, or capillary. Yet more than just gore and the grotesque, Cordero’s works, which draw inspirations from the streets, idiosyncratic semiology of various subcultures, popular culture, myths, and mass media, is reflective of a contemporary fascination with both the refined and the lewd. In Soft Death, which showcases a series of new drawings and paintings, ornate savagery appears alongside jovial or otherwise indifferent characters, often critically wounded or in a state of physical distortion—perhaps hinting at the contradiction underlying contemporary culture. Repulsive yet strangely captivating, Cordero’s works are an ingenious manipulation of the sick pleasure one derives from the abject, and a direct confrontation with contemporary society.
Louie Cordero was born in 1978 in Manila, Philippines. Trained as a painter, he graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines in 2001. He has had numerous solo exhibitions, the most recent being Absolute Horror (2008) at Mo_Space, Manila. Cordero has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in Philippines and USA and has also been shown in Australia, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong, including The Beast in Me (2007), Show Room Gallery, New York, USA; Coffee, Cigarettes and Pad Thai: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia (2008), Eslite Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan; World of Painting (2008), Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, Australia and FUTURAMANILA (2008), Osage Kwun Tong, Hong Kong, and Osage Singapore. He was a recipient of The Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Awards in 2006, Ateneo Art Award in 2004 and the Grand Prize Winner, Painting Category, in the 8th Annual Freeman Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, USA in 2002-2003.
