Eduardo Úrculo Biography

Eduardo Úrculo

(Santurce, 1938-Madrid, 2003) Spanish painter.A decisive creator in the history of the avant-garde in Spain, Eduardo Úrculo was the promoter of pop art in Spain and, together with the late Equipo Crónica, one of its highest representatives.Although throughout his artistic career he went through various styles, from the social expressionism of his beginnings to the neo-cubism of some paintings in recent years, it was within the current of pop art where his work was manifested with a more audacious language and personal.Throughout his life, he held countless exhibitions, some of them as important as the one dedicated to him in 1997 by the Cultural Center of the Villa de Madrid or the anthological exhibition offered by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas in 2000.

Eduardo Úrculo

Eduardo Úrculo was born on September 21, 1938 in the Biscayan town of Santurce.In 1941, the rigors and hardships after the Civil War led his family to move to Sama de Langreo, a small, and at that time prosperous, town in the Asturian mining basin.

He spent his childhood in that town, which, like that of so many other postwar Spanish children, was marked by famine and the forced hardships of those difficult years.In 1948 he entered the secondary school, but four years later he would leave his studies to start working as a surveying assistant in a mining company.

Even so, the years he spent in this center were not in vain, since that was where his interest in drawing awoke and where he discovered, through illustrated books, the work of painters such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh or Amedeo Modigliani."It was thanks to those low-quality reproductions that I began to become familiar with paintings that I had never seen," he would say years later, recalling his hazardous artistic beginnings.

In 1954, due to serious hepatitis, he had to stay in bed for about nine months, a circumstance that he took advantage of to devote himself more to the study of drawing and painting.Having recovered from the illness, and reincorporated back to his old job, he began to paint-in the manner of his admired Impressionist painters-the houses, the nooks and the streets of his adopted village.This was precisely the theme of his first solo exhibition, which took place in 1957 in the neighboring town of La Felguera (Asturias).

First creations and transition

After that exhibition, the Langreo City Council awarded him a scholarship that allowed him to move to Madrid, where he attended classes at the Círculo de Bellas Artes and at the National School of Graphic Arts.Also, during his stay in the capital of Spain, he dedicated himself to painting the impoverished environment of factories and suburbs with a clear intention of denunciation.The works belonging to this period have been classified by critics as "social painting" or "social expressionism."

The following year, the young Úrculo saw one of his childhood dreams come true: traveling to Paris.In the French capital, in addition to receiving classes at La Grande Chaumière, he had the opportunity to see with new eyes many of those works that as a child he had apprehended through the black and white images of illustrated books.

In 1960 the military service took him to Western Sahara first and a year later to the Canary Islands.In Tenerife he befriended the surrealist artist Eduardo Westerdahl, under whose influence he would paint a series of abstract works (the only ones of his career).Those explorations, although ephemeral, nonetheless served to enrich his painting plastically and acquire greater fluency in the technique and treatment of matter.In February 1962 he traveled again to Paris, where he returned to figurative expressionism and the social background themes that had characterized his early works.

In 1966, and after going through a strong creative crisis that made him abandon "social painting", he settled in Ibiza, at that time a true Mecca of the hippy movement.This period of transition and deep questioning of the pictorial practice culminated a year later when, on a trip through northern Europe, he discovered-in an anthological exhibition of American pop art in Stockholm-the works of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg.What he had so eagerly sought in Ibiza-a new creative language-he finally found, as if by magic, in Sweden.

The «erotic age»

His painting was immediately imbued with the postulates of pop art , which was technically translated in the abandonment of oil for acrylic and in the use of a much warmer color palette, chromatically closer to the world of advertising and comics.Likewise, in the thematic, his painting also underwent substantial changes: his maximum reference became the female body, which, already whole and fragmented, he represented in suggestive positions.

This period, which would span the late sixties and the entire seventies, has been defined as the "erotic age." But even so, the works of those years would not be as banal-and more so taking into account the political situation of Spain at that time-as it might seem at first glance.

The artist himself, reaffirming precisely the transgressive nature of these paintings, would say: «My works of that time participated in some way in the so-called" sexual revolution ", they had a purpose of struggle, of self-assertion against a repressive system ».Coinciding with the pregnancy of his wife in 1975, he enriched his iconographic repertoire with a new element, the cow, with which he wanted to symbolize fertility and motherhood.

Exploring new paths

From the eighties on, autobiographical motifs gradually displaced the previous ones.Thus, the loneliness of modern man, the figure of the wandering traveler or the artist's relationship with his work, will be captured on the canvas through those disturbing characters-alter ego of the artist himself-, dressed in hats and always with their backs to the viewer..These self-absorbed and absent-minded figures would be, according to their author, an existential representation of the man who "as the lonely protagonist of a metaphorical journey, dives into the spaces of the intimate beyond the empty city."

In 1984 he made his first bronze sculptures, which could be exhibited the following year at the Arco contemporary art fair.Without ever abandoning painting, sculpture will occupy, especially from the following decade, an increasingly relevant role in its activity.In these pieces, Úrculo, who always defined himself as "a painter who makes sculptures," will reproduce in cast bronze some of the most significant images in his repertoire: empty chairs, suitcases, umbrellas, hats, etc.

However, his best-known sculptures will be those that were located in public places, such as: The traveler (1991), at the Atocha station in Madrid; Tribute to Santiago Roldán (1993), in the gardens of the Olympic Village in Barcelona; The return of Williams B.Arrensberg (1993), in Oviedo, or Exaltation of the apple (1996), in the Ballina park in Villaviciosa.

In recent years, and as a result of the admiration he felt for Japanese prints, a series of works with an oriental theme was born whose main character was the figure of the geisha.Unlike past times, it will not represent the naked oriental woman, but dressed in the traditional kimono.This clothing, in a way, will be a pretext in which he will project geometric and rhythmic compositional games.

On March 31, 2003, when in the company of his wife, Victoria Hidalgo, he was attending a lunch at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, he died suddenly of a heart attack.Until that moment, the artist was full of vitality and projects; Just three weeks earlier, he had attended the opening of an anthological exhibition of his work in Beijing and for July he had scheduled his first exhibition in New York, at the Galander O'Reilly Gallery, a project that his widow and the painter's son would carry out., Yoann, born from his first marriage to French Annie Chanvallon.