Having traveled to Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean in the preceding years, Pacita Abad and her husband Jack Garrity moved to Manila in 1982, where they would spend the next four years. This was a period marked by new creative breakthroughs and discoveries, as well as growing recognition for the artist, culminating in Pacita’s first solo exhibition Pacita Abad: A Philippine Painter Looks at the World at the Museum of Philippine Art in 1984.

Helmut’s Cosmic Shoes is a standout early trapunto textile painting from the artist’s acclaimed Asian Abstraction series. Inspired by a German expat friend who made frequent trips to Marikina, the shoe capital of the Philippines, to customize footwear, the work transforms a playful personal reference into a composition of extraordinary energy and visual richness. Pacita pushes the painterly surface to its limits here, layering rhythmic mark-making with buttons, mirrors, beads, and other found materials collected her travels.

The surface reveals itself through meticulous pointillist clusters, dotted constellations, swirling forms, and glyphs rendered in pulsating, contrasting hues. The result is a dynamic, almost celestial composition charged with movement, humor, and affection, and anchored in the material and visual exuberance that defines Pacita’s practice.

The painting was included in two major solo exhibitions of Asian Abstraction in 1984 and 1986 and has remained in private hands since the 1990s. It re-emerges at a time of deepening international attention to Pacita Abad’s groundbreaking contributions to global contemporary art.

Asian Abstraction Series

Training in oriental brush painting during a trip to Korea in 1983, Abad spent the next few years spinning the traditional emphasis on line into a complex, colorful vocabulary. Repurposing the training sheets she produced during her lessons, rich with dark lines, Abad reworked these forms with colors, painted them, then copied the patterns to canvas on her return to her studio. Asian Abstractions speaks to Abad's prophetic ability to demonstrate the mutability of tradition, as well as her interest in inter-Asia solidarity and cultural dialogue.