Ronald Ventura

Ronald Ventura is a contemporary Filipino artist known for his dynamic melding of realism, cartoons, and graffiti. Portraying scenes of chaotic disarray, Ventura culls from science fiction, Western history, Asian mythology, Catholicism, and popular comic book characters, in producing his work. “I will paint and update a painting until I am satisfied. It’s like a film director who is shooting a scene—at certain points he will feel like he needs more extras or more light,” he said of his working method. “This is the closest analogy to my painting process that I can think of. It is like a process of addition and subtraction.” Born in 1973 in Manila, Philippines, the artist earned a BFA in painting from the University of Santo Tomas in 1993. In 2011, Ventura’s painting Grayground set a record for the most ever paid for a work of Southeast Asian contemporary art, when it sold for $1.1 million at Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Paintings auction in Hong Kong. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, and is included in many private collections. Ventura continues to live and work in Manila, Philippines.