Pablo Atchugarry

Pablo Atchugarry (b. 1954) was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, to two passionate art enthusiasts. His father Pedro trained under the famed Uruguayan Constructivist Joaquín Torres-García before encouraging his son to develop his own considerable talent for painting. In 1972, at the age of eighteen, Atchugarry held his first solo exhibition at the Civic Room in Montevideo; that same year, he conducted his first experiment in sculpture, rendering a horse cast in concrete. In the following years he would briefly study architecture, exhibit in Brazil and Argentina, and eventually depart South America in 1977 for Europe.

Abroad, Atchugarry found success showing his paintings in Copenhagen, Spain, France, Italy, and Milan. After a landmark 1978 exhibition in Lecco, Italy, he turned his efforts toward sculpture in 1979, and completed his first monumental sculpture in Carrara marble in 1982, the same year he moved permanently to Lecco. He held his first solo sculpture exhibition in 1987 at Bramantino's Crypt in Milan. Beginning in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, he completed numerous major public projects, including La Pietà, carved from a single twelve-ton block of marble, and Semilla de la Esperanza, installed in the sculpture park on the grounds of Uruguay's government building.

The Museo Pablo Atchugarry, founded by the artist in Lecco in 1999, houses a body of work spanning his entire career. He carefully scrutinizes each block of marble he selects, and currently sculpts in white Carrara marble, gray Bardiglio, black Belgian marble, and pink Portuguese marble, alongside bronze, ceramic, and wood. In 2012, the Times Square Alliance selected his Dreaming New York for exhibition in Times Square during the Armory Show.