X marks the spot for León Gallery’s Kingly Treasures Auction as it uncovers a sleeping Josephine Bracken sculpture and the last surviving twin seal of Andres Bonifacio León Gallery is no stranger to finding, keeping, and sharing treasures. After all, since 2010, the gallery has turned art appreciation, acquisition, and education into, well, an art itself. The question, then, is this: Can the 2024 edition of León Gallery’s Kingly Treasures Auction chart out another successful run? The simple answer? Absolutely.
And the fact that the auction falls on Bonifacio Day (Nov. 30, Saturday) sets the heroic tone reverberating across the 157-piece catalog culled from various collections. Even founder and director Jaime Ponce de Leon’s prologue crackles like a rallying cry around Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio—two personas, identities, psyches, and star pupils of Filipino history that serve as the fundamental inspirations for the third Kingly Treasures Auction.
“Our year-end auction thrusts into the spotlight none other than our two most revered heroes, brothers in the name of independence, twin spirits who, through the mightiness of the pen and the defiance of the sword, sparked the struggle for independence,” he says. That Rizal’s 128th anniversary of his martyrdom is commemorated on Dec. 30 and Bonifacio’s 161st birth anniversary will be celebrated on the auction day means that those who step inside León Gallery are in for a ride poised between a metaphorical .
