The Drawing Room is a contemporary art gallery in Makati City, Philippines. It features artists from the Philippines whose respective practices investigate the complementary and often merging position between their oeuvre and lifestyles. The gallery exists in a dynamic and in-depth platform with its artists, presented in The Drawing Room’s support in interdisciplinary artistic processes. The artists maintain a priority towards specific cosmopolitan and urban thinking, as well as personal synchronicisms between histories we inherit and histories we are shaping. The Drawing Room’s stable of artists rarely documents. Their research-based and experientially-grounded methods represent the Philippines in constant frenetic flux – very removed from journalistic portrayals of its historical and contemporary society. However, the artists from The Drawing Room depict the ensemble of realities that make up a complex society. With a strategic and critical program of exposure, The Drawing Room propels these artists in international art fairs and through collaborations with institutions and other commercial venues local and abroad.
Founded by Cesar Villalon Jr. in 1998, The Drawing Room began as a specialist venue that moderated the revitalising of works on paper. It reinforced works by Filipino draughtsmen and soon, this alcove of a particular medium expanded to various artistic formats grounded on defined sensibilities that map the complex scope of thinking attributed to the contemporary terrain of Philippine art. The Drawing Room values the depth of relationship a gallery offers to the artist, mediating career design even in the breadth of global competence.
Aside from monthly exhibitions of its stable of artists in its venue in Manila, it circulates its artists’ off-site shows in other spaces in Singapore, Taipei, Jakarta, Beijing, Turin and London. The gallery displays an involvement to the role of reputable art fairs in providing an extensive reach for contemporary art. It is a regular participant of Hong Kong Art Fair, Singapore Art Fair and the Scope Art Fair in New York, Miami and Basel, and was part of the roster of exhibitors in Pulse Los Angeles (2011), India Art Summit (2010, 2011) and Slick Paris (2010).
The Drawing Room continues to extend its mission by expanding to Gillman Barracks in Singapore in September 2012.
