Nona Garcia

Nona Garcia was born in 1978 in Manila, Philippines. She attended the Philippine High School for the Arts, where a basic drawing elective introduced her to painting in her senior year. After high school she briefly studied Human Biology on a premed track at De La Salle University, completing one year before transferring into fine arts. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of the Philippines Diliman, studying there from 1996 to 2000.

In 2000 she won the Grand Prize at the Philip Morris ASEAN Art Award in Singapore, and in 2003 she received the Cultural Center of the Philippines' Thirteen Artists Award. Her practice grew to combine photographic realism with medical X-ray imagery, often used to picture reliquaries, religious statues, and skeletal remains, playing on what an image conceals and what it reveals. In 2013 she relocated from Manila to Baguio City in Benguet Province, a move that shifted her landscape subjects toward the mountains and forests of the Cordillera. She continues to live and work in Baguio City.

Garcia's institutional profile has been built primarily through survey exhibitions rather than commercial press: the 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in 2005, the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in 2018, and Passion and Procession: Art from the Philippines at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2017 all placed her among the artists framing contemporary Philippine art for international audiences. Writers on her work consistently return to her central device, the pairing of photographic realism with X-ray imagery, as a way of asking what a picture withholds even as it appears to show everything. No exact, attributable critical quotation could be confirmed from a named critic in a major outlet for this profile; that gap should be closed before any pull quote is added.

Garcia's auction record is anchored by In The Garden, reported to have sold for USD 124,234 at a Sotheby's Hong Kong sale in 2008. That figure traces to a single secondary market-data aggregator and has not been independently confirmed against a primary auction-house record, so it is presented as the best available estimate rather than a confirmed data point, and the exact sale date could not be verified. Recorded auction results for her work otherwise range from roughly USD 1,000 to just above USD 124,000 per the same aggregated source, reflecting a market that is real but comparatively thin and concentrated in Southeast Asian sale rooms. She is represented by Silverlens Galleries, with a program of gallery and museum exhibitions in Taipei, Singapore, and New York that has broadened her audience beyond the Philippines in recent years.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Garcia, and her auction history, while including a reported high-water mark from the 2008 Sotheby's Hong Kong sale, rests on a single, unverified secondary source and is thin enough that any single result should be read with caution rather than as a stable price trend. Her market is still primarily regional, run through Silverlens Galleries and a small number of Southeast Asian and international exhibition partners, which makes gallery-level provenance and direct confirmation with her primary representative especially important for prospective buyers.