David Medalla (b. 1942, Manila, Philippines) was considered a literary child prodigy having been admitted at age 12 to Columbia University in New York where he studied ancient Greek and modern drama, modern literature, philosophy and attended poetry workshops. He later travelled to Europe in the 1960s and met with the most advanced thinkers of the time, such as Gaston Bachelard, Louis Aragon and Marcel Duchamp. In this vibrant atmosphere, Medalla grew to become a pioneer of kinetic art, earth art, performance art, participation art and conceptual art. When he moved to the UK, he co-founded the SIGNALS Gallery (with Paul Keeler) in 1964 where for two years SIGNALS became a showcase for the international avant-garde, the converging fields of art and science, hosting major exhibitions of work from Naum Gabo to Lygia Clark. These artists both informed and were informed in dialogues with Medalla, dialogues illustrated passionately in Medalla’s magazine SIGNALS, published to accompany the exhibitions. Medalla and Keeler were the first in London to introduce the renovating spirit of Kineticism and Nouvelle Tendance [New Trend] through works that were being produced in Paris during the 1960s.After the closure of SIGNALS, Medalla was busy setting up other international arrangements: In 1967 he initiated the Exploding Galaxy, an international confluence of multi-media artists, significant in hippie/counterculture circles, particularly the UFO Club and Arts Lab. From 1974 - 1977 he was chairman of Artists for Democracy, an organisation dedicated to 'giving material and cultural support to liberation movements worldwide' and director of the Fitzrovia Cultural Centre in London. In New York, 1994, he founded the Mondrian Fan Club with Adam Nankervis as vice-president. Later in 1998, he also became the founder and director of the London Biennale in 1998, a “do-it-yourself” free arts festival.
