Spruce Gallery PH

Spruce Gallery’s art programming brings together exhibitions, artist conversations, launches, readings, and cultural gatherings that invite people to look closer and stay longer. Rooted in the gallery’s affection for print, image, object, and encounter, the program creates room for artists, writers, editors, collectors, and the culturally curious to share work, test ideas, and meet a public willing to give attention its proper furniture.

At Spruce, art gives the room its pulse: through looking, talking, collecting, lingering, and the occasional glass of wine that begins as hospitality and ends, mysteriously, as conviction.

ART

EXHIBITIONS

CHROME DREAMS OF ELSEWHERE

Motion, Memory, and the Imagined Life

MARC ABASOLO

PAINTINGS

18 JULY - 17 AUG 2026

Marc Abasolo’s first solo exhibition at Spruce Gallery brings the automobile into the room as memory, desire, ambition, and imagined escape. Known for commissioned paintings of coveted cars and watches, Abasolo turns here toward a more personal body of work, where machines carry the emotional weight of childhood longing, Manila traffic, collector fantasy, and the private theater of arrival. The car becomes a vessel of projection: chrome, color, speed, status, weather, and the very human suspicion that somewhere else may come with better upholstery, clearer roads, and fewer relatives asking practical questions.

Curated by Ric Gindap and staged with Allan “Bolty” Gañgo, the exhibition frames Abasolo’s automotive world through contemporary art, pop memory, design culture, and the strange democracy of movement in a city where even a Lamborghini must eventually negotiate with a jeepney. These works reveal the stories we place inside machines: who we wish to become, where we imagine ourselves going, and how desire learns to shine under artificial light. In Abasolo’s hands, the machine begins to dream, and the viewer is invited to look at longing with its headlights on.

KEVIN PINEDA

PHOTOGRAPHY, MIXED MEDIA

22 MAY – 20 JUNE, 2026

Fragmentia: Oculations of Reality gathers Kevin Pineda’s fractured photographic works into a world where the image becomes stranger, sharper, and more physically present. Moving across photography, interiors, furniture, editorial image-making, and material experimentation, Pineda approaches the photograph as something with a body: folded, mirrored, interrupted, held in tension, and made to converse with steel. His images ask to be read through surface and structure, through the pressure of touch, reflection, glamour, memory, and the occasional nervous breakdown of beauty behaving far too well for its own good.

Brushed stainless steel becomes casing, threshold, accomplice, and witness, giving the works a seductive architectural charge. In Fragmentia, the image finds another life through fracture: an aperture, a hinge, a shimmer, a proposition. Pineda invites us to look closely at what happens when the photograph leaves the flatness of the page and becomes an object in the room, alert to light, angle, body, and gaze. The result is intimate, cinematic, and materially alive: photography with edges, appetite, and a very persuasive relationship with its own reflection.

SQUARES OF WATER

JEFF SISCAR

PAINTINGS

11 APRIL – 08 MAY, 2026

Squares of Water marks Jeff Siscar’s first solo exhibition at Spruce Gallery, bringing together works shaped by architecture, perception, and the emotional behavior of space. Trained as an architect and known for a practice that moves between built environments and visual art, Siscar approaches painting as a site where structure begins to loosen, water resists obedience, and the eye learns to stand at the edge of certainty without immediately calling for adult supervision. His squares hold pools, thresholds, reflections, and atmospheres that feel measured and unstable at once, like rooms remembering they were once weather.

Through repetition, restraint, and a precise sense of spatial tension, Siscar turns the square into a psychological field. Water becomes thought, architecture becomes mood, and perspective becomes a place of hesitation, where the viewer is invited to look, pause, and remain inside the question a little longer.

In Squares of Water, the image becomes a threshold for feeling: disciplined, lucid, quietly unnerving, and charged with the strange comfort of not knowing exactly where one is standing.

MOMENTS OF LIFE - LIVE MOMENTS

STEPHAN HOLZINGER

PHOTOGRAPHY

14 MARCH – 09 APRIL, 2026

Stephan Holzinger’s street photographs move with the alertness of someone who has learned that life rarely announces itself before becoming interesting. A Munich- and Lisbon-based photographer, Holzinger works in the charged interval between chance and attention, catching gestures, glances, collisions, weather, tenderness, absurdity, and the small public dramas that make a city feel secretly rehearsed.

His images are candid without feeling casual, humane without becoming sentimental, and often very funny in the way reality becomes funny when it realizes someone has brought a camera and excellent timing.

Presented at Spruce Gallery alongside the monograph Moments of Life, Live Moments, the exhibition extends Holzinger’s belief in photography as an act of noticing. Streets become stages, strangers become brief protagonists, and ordinary scenes acquire the dignity of being seen properly. The book and exhibition also carry the project’s larger spirit of generosity, with proceeds supporting charitable work for children and communities in need. In Holzinger’s world, the street gives itself in fragments: a face, a shadow, a joke, a passing mercy, and the unmistakable feeling that the everyday has been waiting for someone patient enough to look.

PORTALS OF CURIOSITY

PJ ALMERA

DIGITAL PRINTS, MIXED MEDIA

15 NOVEMBER - 30 DECEMBER 2025

PJ Almera’s Portals of Curiosity enters the image as a threshold: luminous, architectural, and charged with the strange intelligence of color. Trained in architecture and immersed in digital art, Almera builds works where arches, passages, and chromatic fields become invitations to look inward through form.

His practice draws from 3D modeling, AI-driven imagery, geometric abstraction, and the old human habit of standing before a doorway and wondering whether one’s life might improve slightly on the other side, preferably with better lighting and fewer administrative complications.

In this body of work, curiosity becomes spatial. Yellow, red, violet, and shifting gradients behave like emotional weather, giving structure a pulse and technology a surprisingly intimate temperature. Almera’s images hold precision and sensation in the same frame, allowing the digital to feel tactile, contemplative, and almost bodily. At Spruce, Portals of Curiosity opens a room for introspection: a place where color becomes atmosphere, architecture becomes feeling, and the act of looking begins to resemble a small private adventure with excellent chroma, elegant uncertainty, and no clear exit except wonder, which is frankly useful architecture.

BEHIND THE DOOR

LIN JAIHANG

PHOTOGRAPHY

14 DECEMBER 2022 – 20 JANUARY 2023

For the Spruce presentation of Lin Jaihang’s Behind the Door, the book launch became a room about rooms: a gathering around privacy, desire, anonymity, and the delicate choreography of being seen. A Taiwanese photographer and book author based in Taipei, Lin built the project through encounters with nearly one hundred strangers photographed in their own rooms, where the camera enters as a guest with excellent manners, a dangerously good memory, and a talent for making silence blush.

Curated at Spruce by Ric Gindap, the accompanying exhibition extended the photobook into the gallery as an atmosphere of temporary intimacy.

Lin’s images hold the body in relation to bed, curtain, light, distance, and hesitation with a softness that feels almost architectural, as though each room has learned to keep a secret while leaving the door slightly open. Behind the Door invites viewers to look at private space as portrait: of longing, self-protection, touch, uncertainty, and the human wish to be known without having to explain everything, which is frankly the dream of art, love, and several complicated text messages sent after midnight and immediately regretted by breakfast anyway.

BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! ART PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION

VARIOUS ARTISTS

PHOTOGRAPHY

MARCH 2024

Spruce formally opened with BOYS! BOYS! BOYS!, the worldwide-traveling exhibition of contemporary queer fine art photography presented in partnership with BOYS! BOYS! BOYS!, Kehrer Verlag, and The Little Black Gallery London. Staged alongside the Manila launch of the book and issue 07 of the eponymous magazine, the exhibition brought together an international roster of photographers working through intimacy, vulnerability, freedom, liberation, fetish, nature, and the persuasive evidence that the human body remains one of culture’s most complicated publishing platforms.

Curated in conversation with founding editor Ghislain Pascal, the presentation marked Spruce as the first venue to stage the traveling exhibition in Asia, setting the gallery’s tone from the beginning: art, print, gathering, music, food, drink, and a room full of people discovering that looking can still be a social act. Held during Spruce’s formal opening in Ortigas Center, BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! announced the gallery as a space for visual pleasure, cultural exchange, independent publishing, and creative hospitality, with just enough provocation to remind everyone that a proper Saturday evening should occasionally require better shoes and a slightly open mind.