Attributed to Nena Saguil, no coa, private collection, medium: oil, measurements: 30"HX42"W framed, very good condition Biography: Nena Saguil was a Filipina artist of modernist and abstract paintings and ink drawings. She was most known for her cosmic, organic, and spiritual abstract works depicting internal landscapes of feeling and imagination. For these, Saguil is considered a pioneer of Filipino abstract art. During her time at UP, in the early 1930s and after World War II, Saguil created impressionistic and naturalistic figurative works, including landscapes and still lifes. She also became enamored with the work of Pablo Picasso and painted "surrealistic and cubistic compositions of Philippine scenes".In taking up a more abstract style after 1950, Saguil experimented with many techniques to achieve various shapes, textures, and relief. These techniques included employing syringes to paint her famous circular forms and dots, rubbing coffee grounds on her works, and fashioning circular canvases.Saguil's circular and organic oval forms simultaneously evoke microscopic and macrocosmic natural landscapes. Her works appear as "biological tissues and net[s] of nerves" as well as "cosmological spheres, orbs, elliptics and terrestrial mandalas. ... as though stating that human existence and the universe are mutually encompassing".Another writer reveled in Saguil's "subtly iridescent and translucent hues of moonstones, opals and fine jade, as well as the ovoid shapes of the singing celestial spheres". Her later works have also been described as infused with spiritual feeling.Relating Saguil's cosmic vision to feminism, Quijon stated that, "If gender is wrought by matrices of labour and sociality, it is also imbricated in the history of abstraction, as disclosure of a cosmic world."[14] A recently unearthed Saguil watercolor, depicting a Filipina Lady Liberty, was painted in 1947, to commemorate the second anniversary of Philippine Independence and more directly encompasses feminist themes. Modeled after Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, the painting features a bare-breasted Filipina holding a Philippine flag in her right hand and a large palm leaf, symbolic of peace and Christianity, in her left. The painting departed from Delacroix's in presenting a Liberty bearing no weapons and contrasted with more masculinist renderings of Philippine independence.