Regarded in the Philippines as one of the foremost artists of her generation, Keka Enriquez relocated to San Francisco in 1998, a city she has called home for nearly thirty years. A consciousness, forged through decades of migration and personal reinvention, invigorates her practice. 

Heaped, erased, repainted, her paintings tell of transformation, movement, and the redemptive power of letting go, themes central to both her life and artistic practice. Enriquez’s paintings pulse with the multiple lives she has lived—along the unruly streets of the Tenderloin, long shaped by immigrant communities from the Philippines; in the wards of San Francisco’s public safety-net hospital, amid the clamor of bohemian bars, the pomp of grandiose churches, and the silences in between she has spent decades listening to. After decades of erasure and reinvention, of painting over and starting again, across Pacific coasts, Enriquez has found a way to place herself in the city’s thrumming and storied topography. Present, attentive, smiling, one element among many in the teeming tide of her West Coast home.

Words by Matthew Villar Miranda

Keka Enriquez (b. 1962, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in San Francisco, California) is a distinguished contemporary artist celebrated for her experimental and expressionistic paintings.  Influenced by the Neo-expressionist movement, Enriquez’s work is characterized by textured brushstrokes, bold colors, and innovative form. Renowned for her exploration of domestic interiors, traditionally the domain of women, Enriquez subverts the masculine art movement to delve into the psychological and social dimensions of home. Through her manipulation of pigment, texture, and surface, she retrieves and reshapes the multi-layered experience  of the homescape while contemplating the significance of painting as a whole. After twenty-five years of working within her San Francisco community, Enriquez returned to the art world in 2023. A showcase in 2024 will unveil a series of new oil on canvas paintings highlighting the evolution of her practice.

Enriquez embarked on her artistic journey in the 1980s under the mentorship of Roberto Chabet, widely acclaimed as the father of conceptual art in the Philippines. The artist graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of the Philippines. She has exhibited her work in the Philippines, the United States, England, Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. In 1994, she was a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Award. Under a grant from UNESCO, she obtained her Masters degree in Fine Arts at the Norwich School of Art and Design, England in 1995.