Marble is the material in which Pablo Atchugarry instills life. At once austere and sensitive, the Uruguayan sculptor‘s works exude timeless elegance. Dorotheum offers two of his works at its spring auction.
A magical combination of spirit, culture, archetypical symbols and Latin American sensibility: these are the characteristics of the creations of the Uruguayan artist Pablo Atchugarry (born in Montevideo in 1954), whose father Pedro introduced him to the world of painting from the time he was a young child. He soon, however, felt the need to express himself in other forms and with different materials as well, and after 1975 he began to assemble large-format high reliefs in concrete, iron and marble. His high reliefs are distinguished by simplicity and neo-plastic rigour, even though these are muted by a sensibility that is clearly Latin American at its core, and which is invariably a mark of his work. In 1979 Atchugarry discovered something that would become his material par excellence: Carrara marble, a discovery which initiated a journey through the history of sculpture, from the Augustan period until today. For Atchugarry – who relocated from Uruguay to distant Lecco in Italy in 1982 – marble represents a return, in a way, to the origins of the creative process, to a classical sculptural idea which has been updated and filtered through the interpretations of masters such as Bernini, Canova, Rodin, Arp, Moore, Brancusi, Picasso, Hepworth, Bloc and others.
Since the early 1980s the artist has employed marble almost exclusively: he visits the sites where the quarrying of the stone takes place, he selects the blocks, and proceeds with great care in the removal and reduction of the material, until that three-dimensional geometric mass, which had imprisoned the soul of his work, is erased. Through this process, Atchugarry is doing nothing other than bestowing life and form to each soul as, step by step, he creates ever clearer, purer and more timeless structures. Michelangelo regarded sculpture as the art of reduction, in order to bring to light everything that was already contained within the material. Yet whereas the great master felt life pulsating in the blocks of marble and sought out the concealed figure, the Uruguayan artist follows the musical and expressive rhythms of the mass without having any fixed goal: the end result is a surprise, born from the mystical balance between fullness and void, material and spirit, handcraft and poetry. Images, reduced to their inner essence. A leitmotif in his work is the clearly cubistic focus on the relationships between mass and space. Also a particularity of many Cubists was the gradual transition from the straight line, from which the characteristic prismatic decomposition originated, towards a curved line, which became ever more unfettered from geometric theorisation. In the work of Atchugarry as well, a progressive upward trend towards a formal elegance and refined sensibility is recognizable, which would become a stylistic feature of the artist.
Upward tension and verticality are additional constant features in the sculpture of Atchugarry; features that, in their striving for purity and formal levity, translate into flowing forms that hardly find a counterpart in reality. For Dorotheum it is a great pleasure to present, at the Contemporary Art auction in June 2016, two wonderful works by this great artist, who is finally enjoying the increasing international recognition due to him: the works are a sculpture of white Carrara marble from the year 2008, and one of black Belgian marble dating to 2006. The mysterious elegance of the black marble, which is so deeply luminous, and the flawlessness and translucence of the white marble from Carrara – along with the vertical élan and seeming levity of the material, which recalls classical drapery folds – lend a rarity and a timelessness to both sculptures, with the result that, according to Paolo Levi, they become “cathedrals, in front of which our souls can bow in meditation in order to overcome the delusive
visual echo”.
(myART MAGAZINE No. 07/2016)
Auction Contemporary Art Part I
Wednesday, June 1, 6pm
Palais Dorotheum Vienna
Auction Contemporary Art Part II
Thursday, June 2, 5pm
Palais Dorotheum Vienna
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