Pablo Atchugarry. Sculpting Light

Curated by Gabriele Simongini

Ten years after his last exhibition in Rome, held at the Trajan’s Markets, and five years after his exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea dedicates an exhibition to Pablo Atchugarry, entitled Sculpting Light.

Uruguayan by birth and Italian by adoption, Atchugarry is a master of the sculptural technique of “carving by subtraction,” according to Michelangelo Buonarroti’s celebrated definition. The artist personally works the marmor, with a preference for Statuario marble from Carrara. His practice thus belongs to the Western sculptural tradition of classical heritage, while simultaneously opening it up to a profoundly spiritual vision of form. For Atchugarry, sculpture is indeed “inner questioning, prayer, invocation, the search for infinity.”

The act of sculpting takes the form of a radical and necessary gesture, grounded in the centrality of the hand and in a direct confrontation with technical and material difficulty. Each work emerges as a challenge and as a search for balance between permanence and movement, memory and contemporaneity. His sculptures are distinguished by metamorphic forms, at times almost aerodynamic, evoking abstract traces of trees, columns, flames, bodies, drapery and architecture, leading the gaze upwards and suggesting a contemplative and regenerative experience.

As Renata Cristina Mazzantini, Director of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, emphasizes in her catalogue text: “In his sculptures, the hardness of marble softens: a dense succession of ‘disciplined’ fissures cuts deeply through the volumes, breaking apart their granite-like solidity. By creating rhythm and movement through the alternation of light and shadow, the artist gives his sculptures both rigor and lightness. A kind of ‘ordered lightness,’ which only apparently recalls pleating, as a symbol of sophisticated elegance.” Similarly, curator Gabriele Simongini observes in his essay: “Looking at Atchugarry’s sculptures, we must lift our faces and eyes, experiencing a primordial, instinctive joy, because these works are filled with an original light, that total light towards which we all tend, perhaps unconsciously […] each of Atchugarry’s works is not closed and complete within itself, but possesses a potential dynamic force, intimate and internal, that could lead it to blossom into space with its inflorescences.”

The exhibition brings together approximately fifty sculptures, offering a broad overview of the artist’s research spanning the last thirty years of his practice. Alongside his celebrated marble works, the exhibition includes sculptures in wood carved from the trunks of centuries-old olive trees, as well as works in alabaster, enamelled bronze and steel. Through these materials, Atchugarry explores different modes of expression: from the organic intimacy of the sinuous forms of the carved trunks to the powerful aerodynamic qualities of the bronzes, and finally to the large-scale environmental sculptures in steel, which engage in a dialogue with light, air and landscape.

The exhibition is exceptionally extended into four sculptures installed within the permanent collection galleries, where the artist’s works establish new and unexpected dialogues with key masters of modern art, including Jean Arp, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore. The resulting encounter highlights affinities, differences and continuities between different periods, reaffirming the value of tradition as a space for a living relationship between past and present. In conjunction with the exhibition, Pablo Atchugarry has donated to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea the important work in Statuario marble from Carrara entitled “Splendore” (2026), created especially for the occasion.

Two catalogues will be published on the occasion of the exhibition: the first featuring photographs of all the works on display, an essay by the curator and texts by David Anfam and Arnau Puig, together with an extensive critical anthology and biography; the second featuring photographs of the works and of the installation in the Museum’s galleries.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Born in Montevideo in 1954, Pablo Atchugarry was encouraged by his family from an early age to study the arts. He initially turned to painting and held his first exhibition in Montevideo in 1972. In the following years, he participated in numerous exhibitions in Uruguay and Brazil. After beginning his sculptural research with a range of materials, including cement, iron and wood, he travelled to Europe in 1977. In Italy, after visiting Carrara, he discovered marble in 1979 and, following his first solo exhibition in Italy, held in Lecco in 1978, decided to settle permanently in the Lombardy city.

Twenty years after his arrival in Italy, in 2001 the city of Milan dedicated a retrospective to him at Palazzo Isimbardi (The Infinite Evolutions of Marble). That same year, the artist began work on his monumental Obelisk of the Third Millennium, a sculpture in Carrara marble destined for the municipality of Manzano, in the province of Udine. In 2002, the city of Carrara honoured him with the prestigious Michelangelo Prize. The following year, he represented Uruguay at the 50th edition of the Venice Biennale.

At the beginning of 2007, he opened the Fundación Pablo Atchugarry in Manantiales, Uruguay, with the aim of promoting the arts and creating a meeting place for artists. Between 2015 and 2016, he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Trajan’s Markets, Museum of the Imperial Fora in Rome (Pablo Atchugarry. Eternal City, Eternal Marbles). Between 2021 and 2022, a major exhibition dedicated to his work was held in the Sala delle Cariatidi at the Palazzo Reale in Milan. In 2022, the MACA, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry, designed by architect Carlos Ott, opened its doors. Numerous works by the sculptor have been exhibited at museums and public institutions, including the Frost Art Museum, Miami (USA); the Groeninge Museum, Bruges (Belgium); the Lewis Family Foundation, Boston (USA); the FAO Museum, Rome (Italy); the Fran Daurel Museum, Barcelona (Spain); the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo (Uruguay); the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires (Argentina); the Muscarelle Museum, Williamsburg (USA); the Norfolk Museum, Virginia (USA); the Pérez Art Museum, Miami (USA); and the Lercaro Collection in Bologna (Italy).