The photographs on the museum wall show a frail, elderly man, variously posed against a tangle of sheets. He is in his early 80s, and the suffering in his face is clear. But the portraits are also whimsical: the man half-hides his face in a pile of flowers, or wears a crown and a cascade of beads. His exhausted eyes stare out from behind a patterned mask.
These photographs by the late Filipino artist David Medalla, a fixture on London’s art scene for decades, were not originally intended to be exhibited. They were composed as “an act of resistance” to the 2016 stroke that left Medalla largely paralyzed, according to Adam Nankervis, the artist’s longtime partner and collaborator.
“It brought him so much joy and allowed him to talk about the ungodly pain he was struggling with,” said Nankervis, who took the photos.
Four years after Medalla’s death in Manila in 2020 at the age of 82, these intimate portraits now form the heart of a retrospective of Medalla’s work at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. It is Medalla’s first major exhibition in the US, a moving exploration of a man whose art and life were inseparable, and who defied his own marginalization within the British art world.
Aram Moshayedi, interim chief curator at the Hammer Museum, first saw Nankervis’ portraits of Medalla in Hong Kong in 2019 and found them “haunting.” Moshayedi was already familiar with Medalla’s most famous pieces from the 1960s—a collaborative sewing project called A Stitch in Time and a series of playful kinetic sculptures called the “bubble machines”—and his subsequent decades as an artist “producing work largely without recognition.”
Although he remained a ubiquitous presence on the London scene, an older gay artist who “had been everywhere and knew everyone”, Medalla’s work had not been shown in major solo exhibitions.
Medalla “was a historical figure even when he was alive,” according to The Guardian art critic Adrian Searle. He was seen as an endearing eccentric whose more recent work was often dismissed as “amateurish.”
In an art world increasingly defined by market forces, money and prestige, Medalla stood out, Moshayedi said. His lack of commercial success didn’t stop him from continuing to explore his creative visions, nor did his loss of physical mobility.
Even in the last years of Medalla’s life, Moshayedi said, “his desire and impulse to make art never really diminished.”
A New York Love Story
The Hammer exhibition takes visitors chronologically through the full story of Medalla’s life, from his teenage years as a precocious literary star in the Philippines, through his studies with Lionel Trilling at Columbia University, to his travels to Paris and London.
In the early 1960s, Medalla helped found the Signals Gallery and became an influential figure in the London avant-garde, best known for his “bubble machines,” foam sculptures that change shape in response to the varying temperatures and conditions in a gallery. One of these works is the centerpiece of a large space at the Hammer Museum. Foam pieces bulge and hang from a cluster of transparent columns, eventually splashing down onto the base. It is both futuristic—a sculpture turned science experiment—and comical and, as Moshayedi has noted, “literally oozing sexual innuendo” in the middle of a silent space.
Like his machines, Medalla was constantly shifting and reinventing his practice in response to new artistic circumstances, moving from these ‘biokinetic’ sculptures to founding an experimental performance art collective, The Exploding Galaxy, in a house on Balls Pond Road in east London. (It fell apart after a police drugs bust.)
As the years passed, Medalla’s work became increasingly political. In 1974, he co-founded Artists for Democracy, a collective designed to organize support for liberation movements around the world. He subsequently organized protests in the Philippines against Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and against American imperialism.
Although Medalla spent much of his life in London, he never became a British citizen and continued to see himself as a Filipino artist. Early in his career, the French art critic Pierre Restany called him “the marginal artist by excelland.”
“I’ve been working here on and off for nearly 20 years, and I haven’t even got my one drawing in an English art collection,” Medalla said in a 1979 interview in the Black Phoenix, a radical magazine. “That’s not my problem: it’s their problem.”
Halfway through the sequence of gallery spaces, the exhibition unexpectedly turns into a love story, when Medalla meets Nankervis and the two artists transform each other’s practice.
Engaging in an artist’s personal relationships is something exhibitions sometimes avoid, Moshayedi says, but “there’s a noticeable shift in David’s work around the time he meets Adam.”
In an interview with the Guardian from Berlin, Nankervis recalled meeting Medalla at the Chelsea Hotel in New York on Christmas 1990. He was in his early 20s and had just arrived from Australia, where he was staying with an artist friend while running an experimental gallery out of another friend’s shop. Nankervis had fallen asleep on the divan, still wearing boots he had painted gold. “About six in the morning there was a knock on the door. Dave came in and said, ‘Who is this?'” Nankervis recalled. “I opened my eyes and [my friend] said, “This is Golden Boots, your Christmas present.”
The two men went to a barbershop around the corner that morning and “it went wrong right away,” Nankervis said. Although Medalla was about 25 years older, they were both interested in “guerrilla tactics” of art, improvisational performances they would call “improvisation,” as Nankervis had done during a year in the Australian desert. The two men collaborated on a years-long series of impromptu tributes to the artist Piet Mondrian, including having a sky painter draw an “M” for the artist Mondrian above the New York skyline and using Mondrian-style swim trunks to make a crass erotic joke.
‘Magic hands and magical eyes’
At times, Medalla was angry about the way the English art world “ignored” him, Nankervis said. The Tate did not buy a work by Medalla until 2006, when it acquired one of his bubble machines.
“His living conditions were a bit miserable and he never had any money,” said Searle, the Guardian critic. Most of Medalla’s art-world followers “had no money either.”
Although “it was quite tough for Dave,” Nankervis said, “he had an incredible sense of pride. He said, ‘I don’t need a studio. Everyone moans about a studio, but I can make a piece of art on my bent knee in my futon in Bracknell,'” the town outside London where he lived.
“His visions were sometimes impractical and very messy,” Nankervis added. Medalla might be captivated by the prism of light in an oil slick on the road, place a piece of paper on the slick to capture the moment — and then put the oily paper in his pocket.
But by using the “junk, the trash from thrift stores and trash cans,” he could also create work that was “meaningful and poetic,” Nankervis said. “He just had magic hands and magic eyes.”
As an artist, Medalla practiced radical inclusion, a stark contrast to art world institutions that “rely on categories of quality” as “a way to keep people out,” Moshayedi said. In 2000, the couple founded a DIY art festival, the London Biennale, that was open to anyone who wanted to participate. People would find their own spaces to show their work: “whether it was in parks and hanging in trees, or in established galleries, or in coffee houses,” Nankervis said.
In his last decade, Medalla has received a number of high-profile recognitions, including the exhibition of his work at the Venice Biennale in 2017. But then Medalla suffered a stroke and, struggling to get him into NHS care, Nankervis moved him first to Berlin and then back to the Philippines.
In his final years, Medalla “sort of made peace with the fact that Britain wasn’t really going to support his legacy. He had kind of given up on that idea,” Nankervis said.
Since Medalla’s death, there have been signs of growing interest in his work. Katy Wan, a curator at the Tate Museum, said the Tate had worked over the past 20 years to focus on “practices that have previously been overlooked” in its collection, including “materially complex approaches in performance, kinetic sculpture and the use of organic materials – all hallmarks of Medalla’s work”.
In a statement, she praised Medalla’s “unique and exciting approach to art making” and his “long-lasting influence on artists both in the UK and internationally”.
According to a Tate spokesperson, the museum’s two Medalla works have been on regular display over the past three years.