(born in Uruguay in 1954)
Untitled, 2006, black marble of Belgium, 219.5 x 50.5 x 50.5 cm (with base) and 209.5 x 24.5 x 23.5 cm (without base), (AR)

Photo certificate signed by the artist, Lecco 21 June 2008, with archive no.PA10406N

Provenance:
LAC, Lagorio Arte Contemporanea, Brescia
European Private Collection

Literature:
Carlo Pirovano, Atchugarry – Catalogo generale della scultura, Mondadori Electa, 2013, no. 246 with ill.

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.
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.
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.
The mysterious elegance of the black marble, which is so deeply luminous, along with the vertical élan and seeming levity of the material, which recalls classical drapery folds – lend a rarity and a timelessness to this sculpture which is a perfect example of the elegant creativity of the artist.