BenCab’s largest sized painting fetched a mind-boggling hammer price of forty million pesos (P40,000,000) at the recently concluded Leon Gallery’s auction. A buyers premium of 16.8% is added to the hammer price which means that the telephone bidder would pay a total of 46,720,000 pesos. Hammer price is the last bid amount before the auctioneer says “going once going twice, SOLD!”
The speculation was that this BenCab’s Sabel masterpiece was bought by someone from abroad.
Benjamin Cabrera is popularly known as BenCab. He was born on August 27, 1942 and was originally from Malabon, Rizal (now City of Malabon in Metro Manila). In 2006, he was awarded the National Artist of the Philippines for Visual Arts (Painting). He was a graduate of Fine Arts from UP Diliman. His alma mater conferred upon him an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree in 2009.
BenCab lived in London for many years. He came back to the Philippines in 1985 after his divorce from his British wife of 16 years, Caroline Kennedy.
I am going to frame this brochure copy from Leon Gallery. This would be the closest I could get to owning a BenCab painting.
