Lot 463 D

In his oeuvre, the artist Pablo Atchugarry from Uruguay concentrates on the processing of stone, bronze, ceramics, and wood. His mostly upright sculptures develop in various series of works that distinguish themselves through a certain combination of contours, openings, and graphs. With the marble sculptures that the sculptor executed from the end of 1970s onwards, he developed his characteristic aesthetic which is defined by the hardness and smoothness of the source material and which often resembles floral shapes. This is also the case with the white Carrara marble that was used for the present sculpture.
„From an initial use of almost exclusively straight lines, with their architectural prisms […] Atchugarry quickly changed to curves, a step often taken by many sculptors and the cubist themselves as a surpassing of hermetism and theoretical extremes to dedicate themselves to feeling, to the hedonism of shape, already conquered by intellect and therefore possessed by the sense. At the same time as the ascendancy of cubism, one sees a recovery of Gothic in its most mystical forms, the endeavour of soaring spirituality, forms represented architecturally by an upward movement that despite their rigidity, still do justice to the formal elegance and refinement of marble.“ (Nicoletta Columbo, The infinite evolutions of marble in: Pablo Atchugarry, exhib.cat. Park Ryu Sook Gallery, Seoul 2015, not paginated).