Painter Keka Enriquez moved from Manila to San Francisco in 1998. In the West Coast Conscious, a pop-up exhibition presented by Silverlens in the city’s historic Chinatown, marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in her chosen home in 25 years.

“San Francisco is my home,” says Enriquez.
“I love San Francisco. I feel very passionate about San Francisco. San Francisco and I have stories to tell.”

Enriquez’s exhibition opens a pair of Silverlens off-site projects in California, to be followed by a presentation in Los Angeles. Together, the shows honor California’s long-standing role as a connector, a gateway of exchange between the U.S. and the Asia Pacific, and an active locus of artistic collaboration.

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.