The Metropolitan Museum of Manila welcomes 2026 by redefining the boundaries of painting

Marking his first institutional solo exhibition in the Philippines, the esteemed German artist Peter Zimmermann unveiled Painting Rules on February 3. Presented in partnership with Nunu Fine Art—a prominent gallery based in Taipei and New York helmed by Nunu Hung—the exhibition is a mesmerising dive into luminous epoxy and oil paintings. Zimmermann, who was born in 1956 in Freiburg and is now based in Cologne, began his artistic journey in the Eighties. Over the decades, he has evolved his practice into complex, large-scale compositions built from layered epoxy resin, which refract and distort photographs, film stills, and digital diagrams.

Zimmermann’s fascination with surface and perception began with his “book cover paintings” in the late Eighties, where he recreated the covers of atlases, travel guides, and dictionaries. Seeking to imitate the protective, glossy sheen of these covers, he experimented with various lacquers before discovering epoxy resin. He soon realised that resin offered not just gloss but also a unique transparency that allowed intricate layering and the illusion of immense depth. This sleek, mechanical aesthetic also served as a deliberate departure from the highly expressive “Wild” painting movement that dominated Germany at the time, allowing Zimmermann to carve out his own distinct, conceptual space.

Today, his work is deeply rooted in the digital age, yet still requires his hand skills. He translates conceptual explorations of digital image generation into his paintings, operating on the philosophy that digital images, though composed solely of algorithms and completely devoid of inherent errors, can still evoke profound emotion and expression through their deconstruction. In the Nineties, lacking the technology to print digital images accurately, he mimicked the CMYK printing process by painting overlapping layers of red, yellow, blue, and black, motioning his boards for the paint to follow his directions. Now, in his latest series, he employs finger painting, using his bare fingers to organically spread the medium across the canvas and create swarm-like patterns.

For this specific exhibition, Zimmermann sought to create a unique dialogue with his host country. Working alongside student volunteers—selected from an open call—he created a sprawling, enveloping mural using stickers. This mural serves as a vibrant, patterned backdrop for his epoxy and oil paintings, leaving some walls deliberately empty to maintain a delicate visual balance. The motifs featured on the stickers are a thoughtful nod to the Philippines, populated through simple digital searches, while the pattern it created was a result of a happy accident on his computer. They feature an image of the old Metropolitan Museum building at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas complex, selected to celebrate the institution’s 50th anniversary this year. They also feature a classic Philippine Jeepney and the national hero, Jose Rizal.

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Zimmermann likened Rizal to an iconic, Che Guevara-esque figure for the Philippines, a presence so ubiquitous that his inclusion was essential. This inclusion is made even more poignant by Rizal’s historical ties to Germany, having lived in Wilhelmsfeld, where he finished his debut novel Noli Me Tangere. By repeating these highly representational stickers into a dizzying algorithmic pattern, Zimmermann comments on how the relentless repetition of images in our daily lives can render them almost decorative or banal. It is a brilliant reflection on perception theory—much like his early works, in which he modified travel guide covers to show how our experiences are often pre-fabricated by what we read, the sticker mural questions how we blindly consume visual information today.

Read more: Art Fair PH Artist Highlight: Peter Zimmermann

In brilliant, visceral conversation with Zimmermann’s digital distillation, Material Instincts formally opened a week later, on February 10. Conceived as a complementary exhibition and elegantly curated by Bambina Olivares, this presentation shifts the lens entirely. If Zimmermann’s work is a masterclass in simulating digital depth on a flat plane, Material Instincts is a triumphant rebellion against the two-dimensional surface entirely.

Where Zimmermann uses algorithms and digital logic to dictate form, the four contemporary Filipina artists featured in Material Instincts allow their chosen media to dictate the form and language of the artwork organically. Set against dramatic, dark blue gallery walls, their works pop with profound three-dimensionality, inviting the viewer into an unapologetic playground of texture. The exhibition explores abstraction through profound material experimentation, where materials are sliced, shaped, stretched, layered, woven, tufted, pleated, and folded.

The textural journey is staggering. Marionne Contreras explores the deep, tactile potential of yarn and felt. Her show-stopping works resemble vibrantly coloured, organically shaped rugs that drip and melt down the gallery walls, or rest languidly on purple plinths on the floor. As the gallery wall thoughtfully notes, these pieces are deliberately amorphous, oriented in different directions, and realised as objects that do not exist in a single configuration. They reject definitive forms, inviting the viewer to experience them as fluid, open-ended installations rather than static objects.

In a grounding contrast to the room’s bright, synthetic colours, Olivia d’Aboville transforms textiles into a dynamic field of experimentation. Her works feature finely pleated, woven geometric fields rendered in earthy tones of ochre, rust, beige, and forest green. Her fibres, as described in the exhibition, “carry stories of nature, craft, and community,” creating works that are not only visual but deeply material. Unlike traditional paint or resin, her textiles demand a quieter, more grounded dialogue, continually inspiring the artist and grounding the viewer.

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Perhaps the most fascinating bridge between Jigger Cruz’s muscular impasto and Zimmermann’s smooth, glossy epoxy is the sculptural paint of Monica Delgado and Michelle Pérez. Both artists push traditional paint well beyond the flat pictorial plane, challenging our expectations of the medium. Delgado’s wall pieces treat paint as a purely sculptural material—extruding it into colourful, wave-like strings, allowing it to cascade in thick vertical drips, or swirling it into dense, white impasto topographies that physically leap off the wall.

Meanwhile, Pérez’s meticulously crafted works feature thousands of tiny, multicoloured cubes of hardened paint. Whether arranged into tight, colour-blocked geometric frames or displayed individually within clear acrylic grid cases, like precious, multicoloured artefacts, these cubes transform the act of painting into intricate, labour-intensive masonry.

The opening of Material Instincts—and its immediate, spatial proximity to Painting Rules—did not go unnoticed by Manila’s art patrons. It was a convergence of minds and media that drew a formidable crowd, all eager to witness this next evolution in contemporary art. In attendance were Mar Roxas, Veana Fores, Bledes Fores, Oye Fores, Spanish Embassy Cultural Attaché Alvaro Garcia, Lizzie Zobel, Libet Virata, and Jaime Ponce de Leon. The guest list also boasted Mark and Cara Wilson; Iñigo, Marilen, and Santi Elizalde; Ana Delgado, Marco Santos, Zelda Kienle, Manny Samson, David and Angel Guerrero, Robert Magsaysay Ho; Yuan, Yanna, and Apa Ongpin, Pam Lopez, Tina Cuevas, Derek Flores, and Trickie Lopa.

This glittering gathering of Manila's most discerning eyes underscores the immense importance of the dialogue currently happening within The M Museum’s walls. To walk through the 3/F North Gallery this season is to experience the full, thrilling spectrum of contemporary art’s possibilities. Enter into the sleek, ephemeral, and algorithmic nature of our digital screens with Peter Zimmermann, and finally find yourself grounded by the heavy, woven, tufted, and sculpted reality of Olivares’s curated show, Material Instincts.

Together, these back-to-back exhibitions firmly position painting not as a static tradition, but as an endlessly evolving field continually shaped by image, surface, and material. Whether born from a digital algorithm, the delicate weave of a textile, or the sculptural manipulation of pigment, the canvas remains a powerful, boundless site of discovery.

Both exhibitions, Painting Rules and Material Instincts, are on view through April 30 at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila’s 3/F North Gallery. Museum hours are Tuesday to Friday from 11am to 6pm, and Saturday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm.

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