‘The marginal artist par excellence’: the pain, politics and playfulness of David Medalla

The photographs on the museum wall show a frail, elderly man, posed in different ways against a tangle of bedsheets. He’s in his early 80s, and the suffering in his face is obvious. But the portraits are also whimsical: the man half-hides his face in a pile of flowers, or wears a crown and a cascade of beads. His exhausted eyes peer out from behind a patterned mask.

These photographs of the late Filipino artist David Medalla, a fixture of London’s art scene for decades, were not originally meant to be displayed. They were composed as “an act of defiance” against the 2016 stroke that left Medalla largely paralyzed, said Adam Nankervis, the artist’s longtime partner and collaborator.

“It just brought him so much joy, and allowed him to speak through the ungodly pain he was dealing with,” said Nankervis, who took the photos.

Four years after Medalla’s death in Manila in 2020 at age 82, these intimate portraits are now at the heart of a retrospective of Medalla’s work at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. It’s Medalla’s first major exhibition in the US, a moving exploration of a man whose art and life were inseparable, and who defied his own marginalization within the British art establishment.

Aram Moshayedi, the Hammer Museum’s interim chief curator, first saw Nankervis’s portraits of Medalla in Hong Kong in 2019, and found them “haunting”. Moshayedi was already familiar with Medalla’s most famous pieces from the 1960s – a collaborative sewing project called A Stitch in Time and a series of playful kinetic sculptures dubbed the “bubble machines” – and his subsequent decades as an artist “who largely produced work without recognition”.

Though he remained an ubiquitous presence in the London scene, an ageing gay artist who had “been everywhere and known everyone”, Medalla’s work had not been featured in major solo exhibitions.

Medalla “was a historical figure even when he was alive”, the Guardian art critic Adrian Searle said, seen as an endearing eccentric whose more recent work was often dismissed as “amateurish”.

In an art world increasingly defined by market forces, money, and prestige, Medalla stood out, Moshayedi said. His lack of commercial success did not deter him from continuing to explore his creative visions, and neither did his loss of bodily mobility.

Even in the last years of Medalla’s life, Moshayedi said, “his desire and impulse to make art never really waned”.

A New York love story

The Hammer exhibition guides visitors chronologically through the full arc of Medalla’s life, from his teenage years as a precocious literary star in the Philippines, to studying with Lionel Trilling at Columbia University, to his travels to Paris and London.

By the early 1960s, Medalla had helped found the Signals gallery and become an influential part of London’s avant garde, most famous for his “bubble machines”, cascading foam sculptures that change shape in response to the differing temperatures and conditions of a gallery. One of these works forms the centerpiece of a large room at the Hammer. Limbs of foam bulge and then droop from a cluster of transparent columns, and eventually splatter on the base. It is both futuristic – a sculpture turned science experiment – comedic, and, as Moshayedi noted, “literally oozing sexual innuendo” in the middle of a quiet room.

Like his machines, Medalla was constantly shifting and reinventing his art practice in response to new artistic conditions, moving from these “biokenetic” sculptures to founding an experimental performance art collective, The Exploding Galaxy, in a house on Balls Pond Road in east London. (It fell apart after a drug bust by the police.)

As the years went on, Medalla’s work became increasingly political. In 1974, he co-founded Artists for Democracy, a collective designed to organize support for liberation movements around the world. He went on to stage protests in the Philippines against Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and against American imperialism.

Though Medalla spent much of his life in London, he never became a British citizen, and continued to think of himself as a Filipino artist. Early in his career, the French art critic Pierre Restany labeled him “the marginal artist par excell ence .”

“Having worked here off and on for nearly 20 years, I don’t even have my one drawing in an English art collection,” Medalla said in a 1979 interview in the Black Phoenix, a radical journal. “That’s not my problem: it’s their problem.”

Midway through the succession of gallery rooms, the exhibition turns, unexpectedly, into a love story, as Medalla meets Nankervis, and the two artists transform each other’s practice.

Engaging with an artist’s personal relationships is something that exhibitions sometimes avoid, Moshayedi said, but “there is a noticeable shift in David’s work around the time that he meets Adam.”

In an interview with the Guardian from Berlin, Nankervis recalled meeting Medalla at New York’s Chelsea Hotel on Christmas 1990. He was in his early 20s, and recently arrived from Australia, crashing at one artist friend’s place while running an experimental gallery out of another friend’s storefront. Nankervis had fallen asleep on the divan, still wearing boots that he had painted gold. “About six in the morning, there was a knock on the door. Dave walked in and said, ‘Who’s this?’” Nankervis recalled. “I opened my eyes and [my friend] said, ‘This is Goldboots, your Christmas present.’”

The two men went out that morning to a barber shop around the corner, and “it just ignited from there,” Nankervis said. Though Medalla was about 25 years older, both of them were interested in “guerilla tactics” of art, improvising performances they would call “impromptus”, as Nankervis had been doing during a year spent living in the Australian desert. The two men collaborated on a years-long series of impromptu tributes to the artist Piet Mondrian, including getting a skywriter to sketch an “M”, for the artist Mondrian, above the New York skyline, and using Mondrian-style swim trunks to make a cheekily erotic joke.

‘Magic hands and magic eyes’

At times, Medalla was angered by the way the English art establishment “did ignore him”, Nankervis said. The Tate did not buy a work of Medalla’s until 2006, when it acquired one of his bubble machines.

“His living circumstances were a little bit abject and he never had any money,” Searle, the Guardian critic, said. Most of Medalla’s supporters in the art world “didn’t have any money either”.

Though “it was pretty tough for Dave”, Nankervis said, “he had incredible pride. He said, ‘I don’t need a studio. Everyone’s complaining about a studio, but I can create an art work on my bent knee in my futon in Bracknell,’” the town outside London where he lived.

“His visions were sometimes impractical and very messy,” Nankervis added. Medalla might be captivated by the prism of light in an oil stain on the road, put a piece of paper on the spill to document the moment – then stuff the oily paper in his pocket.

But using the “flotsam, jetstam of thrift shops and garbage bins”, he could also make work “weighted in meaning and poetry”, Nankervis said. “He just had magic hands and magic eyes.”

As an artist, Medalla practised radical inclusion, a stark contrast to the art world institutions that “rely on categories of quality” as “a way of keeping people out”, Moshayedi said. In 2000, the couple founded a DIY arts festival, the London Biennale, that was open to anyone who wanted to participate. People would find their own places to display their work: “whether it was in parks and hung in trees, or in established galleries, or in coffee shops”, Nankervis said.

In his final decade, Medalla saw some high-profile recognition, including having his work displayed at the 2017 Venice Biennale. But by then Medalla had had his stroke, and, struggling to get him care from the NHS, Nankervis first moved him to Berlin, then back to the Philippines.

In his last years, Medalla “kind of made peace with the fact that Britain was not really going to support his legacy. He’d kind of given up on that notion,” Nankervis said.

Since Medalla’s death, there are signs that interest in his work is growing. Katy Wan, a Tate Museum curator, said the Tate had been working over the past 20 years to focus on “practices that have been previously overlooked” in its collection, including “materially complex approaches in performance, kinetic sculpture and use of organic materials – all of which are hallmarks of Medalla’s work”.

In a statement, she praised Medalla’s “unique and exciting approach to making art”, and his “long-lasting influence on artists both in the UK and internationally”.

In the past three years, a Tate spokesperson said, the two works of Medalla’s that the museum owns have been frequently on display.