Filipino folk life is captured by Manansala in the serigraph featuring two women pound rice before the fields in Nagbabayo (Pounding Rice).  In the distance, bahay kubos (Filipino nipa huts) are seen clustered together, attesting to the communal life of a close-knit society. The image is more reticent in color reflecting elements of Asian countryside culture.

Vicente Manansala is a Filipino cubist painter and illustrator who graduated from the University of the Philippines, School of Fine Arts. He worked as an illustrator for the Philippines Herald Magazine and, in 1948, won awards in the First National Art Exhibition of the Art Association of the Philippines. He studied in Canada, Paris, Los Angeles, New York and Zurich and was a student of renowned Cubist Fernand Leger, developing his own style called transparent cubism. He was part of the Thirteen Moderns and the Neo-realists, groups at the forefront of the modern art movement in the Philippines, and was a significant influence on a younger generation of artists.

 

In 1981, he was declared a National Artist for Painting shortly after he passed away.  Vicente Manansala was a direct influence to his fellow Filipino neo-realists: Malang, Angelito Antonio, Norma Belleza and Manuel Baldemor. The Honolulu Museum of Art, the Lopez Memorial Museum (Manila), the Philippine Center (New York City), the Singapore Art Museum and Holy Angel University (Angeles City, Philippines) are among the public collections holding work by Vicente Manansala. Holy Angel University recently opened a section of its museum called The Vicente Manansala Collection, holding most of the estate left by the artist.