Allan Cosio, Filipino postwar and contemporary artist, dies at 79
Published May 1, 2021 2:19pm
This portrait of Allan Cosio was drawn by his friend, the late artist Onib Olmedo. PHOTO COURTESY OF DANA COSIO-MERCADO Filipino postwar and contemporary painter, sculptor, and production designer Allan Cosio has passed away. He was 79. According to his daughter, Dana Cosio-Mercado, the multi-awarded artist died April 29, 2021, in Pampanga after battling COVID-19. Mercado shared a tribute to her father on social media. “We comforted ourselves that he was exactly where he wanted to be, in his home province. That he was not attended to with pomp and circumstance. That there was a beautiful sky that embraced us all, physically present and not. And that he was ready when he was,” Dana wrote.
Allan Cosio (Photo from Alliance Française de Manille Facebook page)
The art and culture industry mourns the death Filipino postwar painter, sculptor, and theater production designer Allan Cosio who passed away on April 29, 2021 at the age 79.
Born on June 20, 1941, Allan made waves in the art scene in the ’70s as a self-taught artist. It was on the theater stage where he met his wife and fellow artist Ivi Avellana-Cosio, who helped him hone his skills as a visual artist, starting out as a thespian and eventually becoming a set designer.
“Cosio was also one of the members of the Saturday Group of Artists,” Fundacion Sanso museum posted. “Allan Cosio was a good friend of Juvenal Sansó and collaborated with him in a 1982 photo-play based on Jean Paul Sartre’s play ‘In Camera. ”
Sanso x Montegrande
Fundacion Sanso again partners with Galerie Joaquin to continue the dialogue between the works of Juvenal Sanso in its collection, with the works of important contemporary artists, and opens its 2021 exhibitions with “The Blissful Expanse of Sea and Sky: Sanso x Montegrande,” an exhibition which focuses on how both artists have used landscape painting as a means of healing and hope.
In the mid-‘50s, Sanso explored the Brittany coast of France and created the iconic landscape that has become synonymous to him an expanse of sea and sky, which, French art critic Jean Dalveze describes as “conveying the melancholic tenderness of the world, its vastness, and the small part we share of it.” This series, which has been collectively called his Brittany Series, has been, for Sanso, a crucial part of expunging his trauma from the Second World War. Starting off with dark colors, and a preoccupation with shipwrecks and stony landscapes in the beginning, through t