bernolflores

"Each work captures a personal inner world—a method of recording and making sense of the experience."

Mata Taga Isda was my first solo exhibition in 2000, presented as the culminating work for BFA studies at the University of Philippines Cebu. The paintings were part of a personal visual diary, combining everyday objects and color to give form to emotion and memory. Each artwork expresses a private terrain—a form of mapping and reflection.

Over time, most of these works disappeared. Some were sold. Others were stolen or destroyed. A few were lost completely, including several that ended up in Singapore. Their absence is real, but the impact they have had on me remains. This site is not only a record of that first exhibit, but also a reminder to continue painting and creating new work.

Now that I’m beginning a new chapter in Germany, I am focused on building fresh momentum.

My current work is shared through the Alemanya Series at bernolflores.kunst. Painting is still how I process life and how I move forward. It allows me to hold on to moments, let go of others, and keep making space for what comes next.

Bernolflores

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www.bernolfores.com

Exhibits

Artist Bio

Bernolflores works along the fault lines of identity, memory, and cultural belonging. Born in Cebu City and shaped by years spent in Manila, Lagos, Accra, Hamburg, and Singapore, she now builds her practice from Syke in northern Germany. Trained in Studio Arts at the University of the Philippines Cebu, her early expressionist works leaned into colour and texture as a way of mapping interior states. From 1995 to 2000, she created Mata Taga Isda, a body of wall‑mounted assemblages in resin, wood, metal, and layered surfaces. These pieces explored how materials can carry memory and how weight, texture, and construction become vessels for psychological residue. After stepping away from the studio for more than a decade, she returned in 2018 with an expanded vocabulary: acrylic, mixed media, ceramics, experimental fibre work, and 3D‑printed forms. She is currently preparing for her third solo exhibition, her first in Germany. Her Alemanya Series distills her visual language further, drawing from the lived experience of migration and the subtle shifts of belonging. The works navigate absence, adaptation, and the quiet recalibration of self that occurs across places and time; complexities of migration and self‑perception. As the founder of UP Cebu Fine Arts Alumni International (UPCFAAI), a non profit collective shaped by shared history and deep affection for her fellow alumni, she continues to open quiet pathways for exhibitions abroad, nurture connections across continents, and keep creative friendships close, a natural extension of her long‑held devotion to community and to the people who formed her earliest artistic life.

Alemanya Series-The Path of Being Fully Seen.

Cebu 2nd Solo Exhibit 2025

The “Alemanya Series - The Path of Being Fully Seen collection marks not only a stylistic evolution, but the emergence of a new form. Materials once used for composition become instruments of memory:

muted acrylics, paper, mixed media and layered textiles was once declarative is now contemplative.

Each piece stands not as a conclusion, but an invitation. This is a visual memoir of transformation. Not linear, but lived. It traces a path from surface to depth, from mastery to vulnerability.

The series honours the years it took to break the frame—and the courage it took to step beyond it. Bernolflores’s work invites viewers into the intimate space between concealment and revelation. Through it, she explores what it means to be truly seen—not as a curated identity, but as an honest, evolving presence.