no title (umbrellas)
Roberto Chabet
21 July – 16 September 2018
Curated by
21 July – 16 September 2018

no title (umbrellas) is a reconstruction of Roberto Chabet’s installation first presented as part of the Side B group exhibition, which he curated at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1987. Composed of several common black umbrellas, each weighed down with stones and hung upside down from plywood planks suspended from the gallery’s ceiling, the work recalled his early kinetic installations in the 70s, such as An Environmental Work (1972), Bakawan (1974), and Waves (1975). In these works, he transformed space and incorporated light and movement as integral elements, creating not just a purely visual experience but also an immersive environment.
Chabet’s umbrellas also refer to the famous line, “As beautiful as a chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,” by French poet Comte de Lautréamont, whose writing had a major influence on the Surrealists. This incongruous pairing prompted André Breton to declare the surreal condition as moment of “resolution of two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, in a kind of absolute reality, a super-reality.” Max Ernst likewise defined it as “a linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them.”
The role of chance and the enforced juxtaposition of entirely unrelated objects became the guiding principles of Surrealism and informed much of Chabet’s own practice as well. In his installations and collages, he challenged rational order and preconditioned perceptions of what constitutes art and reality by bringing together a trove of “anxious objects”– plywood panels, shelves, boats, clocks, canes, parachutes, mirrors, neon signs, arrows, bells, envelopes, maps, books, photographs, drawings, torn magazine pages, and other detritus of modern life. He sought meaning not only in the banal materiality of these objects but in the unexpected slippages brought on by their chance connections.
Exhibition Documentation
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- no title (umbrellas)
Black umbrellas, stones, plywood planks, red strings
Variable dimensions
1987 / 2018 - no title (umbrellas)
Black umbrellas, stones, plywood planks, red strings
Variable dimensions
1987 / 2018 - no title (umbrellas)
Black umbrellas, stones, plywood planks, red strings
Variable dimensions
1987 / 2018
Exhibition View
360° View
Video Catalogue
About the Artist
About the Artists

Roberto Chabet (1937–2013) was a pioneering Filipino conceptual artist, curator, and teacher. Known for his experimental works, ranging from paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, and installations made out of mostly ordinary and found material, Chabet insists on a more inclusive approach to art. In his works, abstraction and the everyday collide, creating spaces for new meanings.
Chabet was the founding Museum Director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) where he initiated the Thirteen Artists Awards in 1970 to support young artists whose works show “recentness and a turning away from the past.” After his brief tenure at the CCP, he led the alternative artist group Shop 6, and taught for over thirty years at the University of the Philippines, College of Fine Arts and at key artist-run spaces in Manila. Since the 70s until his death in 2013, he supported and curated exhibitions of young Filipino artists.
Chabet is the recipient of the JD Rockefeller III Fund Grant (1967–1968), the Republic Cultural Heritage Award (1972), the Araw ng Maynila Award for the Visual Arts (1972), and the CCP Centennial Award of Honours for the Arts (1998). He was posthumously awarded the Gawad CCP Para Sa Sining in 2015.
Related Exhibitions
About the Artists
About the Artist
Roberto Chabet (1937–2013) was a pioneering Filipino conceptual artist, curator, and teacher. Known for his experimental works, ranging from paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, and installations made out of mostly ordinary and found material, Chabet insists on a more inclusive approach to art. In his works, abstraction and the everyday collide, creating spaces for new meanings.
Chabet was the founding Museum Director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) where he initiated the Thirteen Artists Awards in 1970 to support young artists whose works show “recentness and a turning away from the past.” After his brief tenure at the CCP, he led the alternative artist group Shop 6, and taught for over thirty years at the University of the Philippines, College of Fine Arts and at key artist-run spaces in Manila. Since the 70s until his death in 2013, he supported and curated exhibitions of young Filipino artists.
Chabet is the recipient of the JD Rockefeller III Fund Grant (1967–1968), the Republic Cultural Heritage Award (1972), the Araw ng Maynila Award for the Visual Arts (1972), and the CCP Centennial Award of Honours for the Arts (1998). He was posthumously awarded the Gawad CCP Para Sa Sining in 2015.
