Pablo Echaurren

About this book

Many works by Pablo Echaurren (b. Rome, 1951), recently exhibited in Rome in the solo show entitled Contropittura, held at the Galleria Nazionale de Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, with the addition of other works are coming in the country from which his family originated. The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago de Chile is exhibiting for the first time a retrospective of the artist. The show, which presents more than 110 of the artistœs workscanvases, drawings, collages, ceramics dating from between the seventies and the present day, along with an ample section of documents, includes his earliest works, pictures in watercolor and enamel paint of small size that reflect the myths of his generation (politics, music) and his personal inclinations (for the natural sciences and collecting). The show also presents the drawings linked to the experience of the so-called Metropolitan Indians,ʺ a movement that, in 1977 in Rome, seized on the aesthetic languages of the artistic avant- garde and used them to denounce the illusionistic world of the media. Evident here is his desire to turn the exclusive research of Marcel Duchamp into a tool that could be used by everyone, in keeping with a plan of collectivization of the historical avant-garde. This is followed by canvases painted in the eighties and nineties, in which contemporary history bursts onto the scene (the protest in Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall), or emerges the influence of the pre-Columbian imagination. The exhibition also illustrates his more recent wall paintings,ʺ in which Echaurren has created a new symbolic alphabet: a series of pictures on the art system that reveal the critical dimension of the artistœs work.