David Medalla

David Medalla (born 1942) is a Filipino international artist. His work ranges from sculpture and kinetic art to painting, installation and performance art. He lives and works in London, New York City and Paris.

Medalla was born in Manila, the Philippines, in 1942. At the age of 12 he was admitted at Columbia University in New York upon the recommendation of American poet Mark van Doren, and he studied ancient Greek drama with Moses Hadas, modern drama with Eric Bentley, modern literature with Lionel Trilling, modern philosophy with John Randall and attended the poetry workshops of Léonie Adams.

In the late 1950s he returned to Manila and met Jaime Gil de Biedma (the Spanish poet) and the painter Fernando Zóbel de Ayala, who became the earliest patrons of his art. In the 1960s in Paris, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard introduced his performance 'Brother of Isidora' at the Academy of Raymond Duncan, later, Louis Aragon would introduce another performance and finally, Marcel Duchamp honoured him with a 'medallic' object.

His work was included in Harald Szeemann's exhibition 'Weiss auf Weiss' (1966) and 'Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form' (1969) and in the DOCUMENTA 5 exhibition in 1972 in Kassel.

In the early 1960s he moved to the United Kingdom and co-founded the Signals Gallery in London in 1964, which presented international kinetic art. He was editor of the Signals news bulletin from 1964 to 1966. In 1967 he initiated the Exploding Galaxy, an international confluence of multi-media artists, significant in hippie/counterculture circles, particularly the UFO Club and Arts Lab. From 1974 to 1977 he was chairman of Artists for Democracy, an organisation dedicated to 'giving material and cultural support to liberation movements worldwide' and director of the Fitzrovia Cultural Centre in London.

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