There's no place like home
The talented maze maker, character creator and micro artist Ian Anderson staged his first solo exhibition in Manila titled “There’s No Place Like Home” at Secret Fresh Gallery, San Juan.
Anderson’s recent exhibition featured 13 meticulous handmade artworks that reflect his painstaking process of building a new home for his intricate line works, brightly colored patterns and odd characters. His doodled oddballs, crazy snippets, modified animals and pieces of pop culture, each with a distinct personality, are first birthed in pen and ink. These fragments of his imagination find sanctuary in his precious pocket-sized sketchbooks before finally transferring them to clean sheets of paper. Anderson’s playground is filled with abstract objects, puzzles, mazes, convoluted structures and friendly monsters — images that often take several months to convert to large-scale paper or canvas.
These four works of his are shown in detail as the full-size image will not show how meticulously detailed his works really are!
Ian Anderson was born in the Philippines and lived in Antipolo during his childhood before he moved to Southern California. He debuted in 2016 with a mural commissioned by Cartoon Network’s headquarters in Burbank, California. His colossal piece on a six-story stairwell was a hand-painted labyrinth intricately outlined using markers and acrylic paints, which he called the “Mazeway to Heaven.” This coincided with his solo exhibition in the same studio that launched his career as an artist.
Ian Anderson also mounted a successful exhibition at the Wieden+Kennedy Tokyo art gallery where he incorporated performance art alongside his framed artworks. In 2018, he had his first group show in the Philippines at the Leon Gallery International featuring his “In the Near Distance” collection. Anderson is now based in the country and maintains his studio at home where he creates massive works of micro art on paper and canvas.
Anderson’s works are profound, detailed and laboriously hand-drawn art rendered in two- or three-dimensional objects and structures. He goes beyond the boundaries of imagination by creating distinct visual narratives with his stunning patterns, puzzles and abstract characters.
With the guidance from Derek Flores of DF Art agency, I am certain that this talented young artist will be able to create more stunning pieces and achieve bigger milestones in the future. I am already thrilled for his next solo exhibition, and hopefully more people can actually see his amazing artworks, hopefully as near as possible, to appreciate his very intricate works!
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