Manila Contemporary is proud to present, in collaboration with Pablo Gallery, Pow Martinez’s latest solo show Dogs Playing Poker. As an expansion and evolution of ongoing ideas, Martinez brings together a variety of subjects, objects and paintings through his characteristic use of kitsch and playful gestures.

The title of the exhibition is taken from the popular early 20th-century paintings of dogs playing poker by American artist CM Coolidge. These humorous scenes, originally commissioned for advertising purposes, were later reproduced as prints and became synonymous with American suburban home decoration. However, rather than visually appropriating Coolidge’s imagery, Martinez uses his work as a wry ideological take on the gamble of art and ideas. Selecting banal objects and interior scenes from cartoons series such as Nickelodeon’s The Ren and Stimpy Show, he manipulates the generic and mediocre in order to subvert the hierarchies of technique, quality and subject matter. This risky ‘bet’ thus highlights the shifting value judgements of taste and connoisseurship in contemporary art itself.

*image (left)
© Pow Martinez 
courtesy of the artist