The lyricism of the sculptures of “Pablo Atchugarry Monumental”

The work of Pablo Atchugarry (Uruguay, 1954) has achieved a great poetic singularity within the sculptural panorama of Latin American abstraction of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The exhibition “Pablo Atchugarry. Monumental” offers us an example of this with a group of sculptures that span more than two decades of work. Sculptures that range from 2010 to 2024. It is a delightful exhibition where both the virtuosity of the craft and the three-dimensional sculptural forms flourish, as well as a spiritual voice of transcendent echoes. His abstract language distills a lyricism, whose inspiration draws from and reinterprets the sources of classical Greco-Latin antiquity. From the language codes of contemporary sculpture, where both expressive resources of minimal art and aesthetic elements of abstraction with lyrical and geometric hues are combined, generating a very unique sculptural art.
But his life in art did not begin with sculpture, but with painting. “I began painting,” the artist recalls in an email interview, “at the age of 8. Then I felt the need to explore the third dimension, that is, depth. That is why my first abstract sculpture in concrete appeared in 1975.” In 1978, his first solo exhibition took place in Lecco (Lake Como), Italy, where four years later, he decided to take up residence in this town in the Italian province of Lombardy. The following year, he worked on his first sculpture in Carrara marble entitled “La Lumière.” In 1983 he amazed with a version of Michelangelo’s “The Pietà” from the Vatican. This monumental sculpture is sculpted from a 12-ton block of Carrara marble. ‘Untitled’, 2024, alabaster, 22 x 8 x 8 inches.

This work would have a notable influence on his sculptural projection, but, even so, stepping strongly in the world of contemporary sculpture, painting continues to interest him greatly. From those years he remembers that: “After my first sculptures in cement, I returned to painting and from it I decided to return to the third dimension, this time using Carrara marble as the fundamental material for my sculpture from 1979 onwards.” His first individual sculpture exhibition took place in 1987 at the Crypt of Bramantino in Milan. Since then, Carrara marble, his mastery as a sculptural material, has been one of the hallmarks of his artistic career. More than five decades have passed since those beginnings through which his work has been widely exhibited, in addition to being part of large collections of important public and private institutions in Latin America, North America and Europe. ‘Untitled’, 2022, bronze covered with car paint. Edition 4 of 8.

The monumental sculptures can be seen in emblematic public spaces in European, Latin American and North American cities and capitals. In the meantime, he created the Pablo Atchugarry Foundation in Manantiales (Uruguay) in 2007 and in 2022 he founded the Pablo Atchugarry Museum of Contemporary Art Atchugarry (MACA). Both institutions are a meeting point between art and the public, but also a forum for debate on collecting, exhibition, research and knowledge of works from the Latin American avant-garde and the promotion and dissemination of new generations of artists.
“Pablo Atchugarry. Monumental” includes small and large-format sculptures in black and white marble, but also bronze and alabaster sculptures, whose titles in most cases are ‘Untitled’. Works in Carrara marble, and in Portuguese marble which is somewhat pinker. They are sculptures that are launched upwards; a kind of columns with soft abstract sinuosities, connecting with the space from the intricacies, surfaces and spaces that enable the verticality of their forms.
There has been much speculation about the reason for his abstract sculpture, which already has a very prominent entity of its own in the field of Latin American abstract art production in the second half of the 20th century. What inspires these forms? Do they have any natural reference, for example, from the world of geological formations? “I think that my abstract sculpture is born, in some way,” Pablo Atchugarry admits, “from the union of faces that look up, towards the sky. That is to say, it arises from a figuration, but also through synthesis: the synthesis of human figures that then transform into a completely unique form, which no longer has the reference of the group of human figures to take on a total independence in terms of form.”

But there is something of an imaginary inspired by the look, one might say speleological, of the limestone formations that “grow” in caves and caverns both in the valleys and mountains of the earth. Specifically, of the stalactites, pointed structures that emerge from the ceiling, and of the stalagmites, those that emerge from the ground. There is in Atchugarry’s sculptures a celestial music that is intoned from the contrast between the fragility, the delicacy of the form and the compact hardness of the material. A transition then occurs where matter is emulsified with spirit. There is also an expansion towards the natural open air because “I am also interested,” says Atchugarry, “in nature, especially trees and plants, which seek light and, therefore, take a vertical direction.”

As a tireless sculptor, he is constantly developing new projects. “I am currently preparing an exhibition for the Hollis Taggart Galleries in New York, and I am doing it from my studio in Uruguay, where the Pablo Atchugarry Foundation and the MACA museum are located. It is the most complete work I have done, because it includes landscaping, architecture, sculpture and all forms of art.”
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