Hernando Ruiz Ocampo (1911–1978) was a Filipino painter, writer, and cultural leader, honored as a National Artist for Visual Arts in 1991. He was a self‑taught painter and also served as editor of the Manila Chronicle Sunday Magazine, where his literary background informed the symbolic depth of his visual works.
As one of the Thirteen Moderns founded in 1938, Ocampo invented a new mode of abstraction that evoked lush Philippine flora, fauna, sunshine, stars, and rain. His canvases were marked by bold colors, biomorphic forms, and rhythmic patterns that suggested organic growth and cosmic movement.
He painted a celebrated series of abstracts called “Mutants”, evocative of biological forms that seemed to oscillate and multiply. Art critic Leonidas V. Benesa observed: “Ocampo’s paintings… showed an almost scientific preoccupation with color.”
Ocampo’s works combined anguish, struggle, and triumph with a distinctly Filipino sensibility. His masterpiece Genesis (1968) became the basis for the curtain design of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Main Theater.
