Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, mixed media
Website: pablomanga.com
Pablo Manga is a Colombian-American visual artist based in Oakland, California, known for geometric abstract paintings made with semi-transparent colored packing tape.
Manga was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a Colombian immigrant father and an Italian American mother, and grew up in and around Cambridge and Boston. He moved to the Bay Area in fall 1991 to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a B.A. in Philosophy in 1996 and later a J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law in 2003. Before turning to art full time, he taught Spanish and bilingual math in New York City public schools, worked as a practicing arts lawyer in San Francisco, and served as an asylum staff attorney for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He now lives in Oakland’s Ivy Hill neighborhood and keeps a studio in the Fruitvale district, which he shares with artists Evan Holm and Christine Wong Yap.
Manga’s signature medium grew out of a chance encounter in Mexico City, where he came across colorful packing tape at a street vendor’s table while exiting a metro station — a material he has described as bridging his interests as something both painterly and plucked from daily life. He builds perceptually charged, color-driven geometric compositions by scissor-cutting semi-transparent packing tape into irregular quadrilaterals plotted by eye rather than ruler, layering them into destabilized grids of non-repeating two-color combinations designed to shift as they are viewed over time. He also works in acrylic on panel. His approach draws on the color theory of Josef Albers and the geometric abstraction of Piet Mondrian, Agnes Martin, and Ellsworth Kelly; his 2011-2012 series “Bold as Love” engaged directly with Mondrian’s work.
Manga’s work has been shown at the de Young Museum (in the museum’s inaugural de Young Open), Root Division (in the “MFA NEVER” exhibition), Southern Exposure, the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Galería de la Raza, and the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, among other Bay Area venues, as well as at Art Basel Miami and SCOPE Miami Beach. He was formerly represented by Hang Art in San Francisco and has held four solo exhibitions at Farm Projects on Cape Cod. In 2020 he received a Parent Artist Residency Award from the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, where he adapted his tape technique to printmaking, and a Certificate of Honor from the City and County of San Francisco. His work is held in the collections of the Cambridge Innovation Center, Google, and the California Tennis Club in San Francisco.
More information is available at pablomanga.com.