Pablo Echaurren

Pablo Echaurren
Born	(1951-01-22) January 22, 1951 Rome
Nationality	Italian

Pablo Echaurren is an Italian painter who was born in Rome in 1951. He is the son of Chilean painter Roberto Matta and Italian actress Angela Faranda. His surname stems from a clerical error in the civil registry office, which was eventually corrected, but Echaurren continued to use the name professionally.^[1]

Career

He started to paint at the age of 18, inspired by the Roman artist Gianfranco Baruchello, and was discovered by the critic and gallerist Arturo Schwarz, who promoted his work in Italy and abroad.^[2]

Between 1971 and 1975 he exhibited in Berlin, Basel, Philadelphia, Zurich, New York and Brussels and in 1975 he was invited to show at the Paris Biennale. His exhibition held at the Schwarz Gallery in Milan in 1974, was presented by Henry Martin, an American art critic and curator who has been writing about Fluxus for almost three decades.^[3] In 1974 he held two solo exhibitions in the USA: in Philadelphia at the Marian Locks Gallery and in New York at the Robert Stefanotty Gallery. His output at the beginning of his career was along minimalist lines, characterized by a conceptual approach and a rejection of pictorial conventions, offering an alternative to the idea of the work of art as fetish.^[4]Child of an age in which art and political commitment were often associated, he played an active part in the movement of so-called indiani metropolitani (metropolitan Indians), a section of the far left that in 1977 adopted the aesthetic languages of the artistic avant-garde.^[5]

Echaurren has also produced illustrations, posters and book covers, including that of the best seller Porci con le ali, as well as “metacomics”. He has also published novels and pamphlets on the world of art.

Since 1997 he is member of the National Academy of San Luca.^[6]

In 2010 he founded the Fondazione Echaurren Salaris with his wife, Claudia Salaris, an avant-garde historian.

Since 2012 he is a blogger for The Huffington Post.^[7]

On March 26th, 2018, Jacopo Galimberti, University of Manchester, held the lecture The Worker, the Militant and the Monster at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York University. The lecture was focused on the visualization of the novel political subjectivities that emerged in 1960s and 1970s Italy. The third and final part was devoted to the drawings of Pablo Echaurren that were published in Lotta Continua in 1977.^[8]

On April 24, 2018, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Mary Ann Caws, Thierry de Duve, David Joselit, Sophie Seita and Elizabeth Zuba conversed in an evening inspired by Dada focusing on the 1917 New York magazine The Blind Man, curated by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, recently republished in facsimile edition by the Ugly Duckling Presse. Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, English and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, started from impressions received in 2017, during the visit to Pablo Echaurren’s exhibition Du champ magnétique. Works 1977-2017, held at the Scala Contarini del Bovolo, Venice, to highlight the seminal value of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century.

Exhibitions

In 2013 the Beinecke Library, Yale University, bought a collection of his documents and drawings related to his work in Counterculture and the Movement of ’77.^[9]"What Pablo is working out here, through endless trial-and-error variations in his own inimitable style, is a conception of art as direct and active engagement in this struggles (and pleasures) of everyday life that played an immensely important role in the intertwined histories of the postwar avant-garde and the culture of protest as it emerged after 1945."^[10]

Since 2000, his work has been presented at solo exhibitions:

• Pablo Echaurren. Dagli anni settanta a oggi (Chiostro del Bramante, Rome 2004)
• Al ritmo dei Ramones (Auditorium Parco della musica, Rome 2006)
• Pablo Echaurren a Siena (Magazzini del Sale, Siena 2008)
• L’invenzione del basso (Auditorium Parco della musica, Rome 2009)
• Crhomo Sapiens (Museo della Fondazione Roma, Palazzo Cipolla, 2010-11)
• Lasciare il segno (MAR, Ravenna 2011)
• Baroque’n’Roll (MACRO, Rome 2011)
• Matta: Roberto Sebastian Matta, Gordon Matta-Clark, Pablo Echaurren (Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice 2013)
• Iconoclast (Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London 2014)
• Contropittura (Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna e contemporanea, Rome 2015)
• Make Art not Money (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile 2016)
• Du champ magnétique (Scala Contarini del Bovolo, Venice 2017)^[11]
• ’77 - Tano D’Amico and Pablo Echaurren (Museo di Roma in Trastevere, Rome 2017-2018)
• Soft Wall (Palazzo della Cultura, Catania 2017-2018)

External links

• Official website
• Foundation website

Selection of publications

• Matta. Roberto Sebastian Matta. Gordon Matta Clark. Pablo Echaurren. Texts by Danilo Eccher, Franco Calarota, Jessamyn Fiore, Claudia Gioia. Cinisello Balsamo (Milan), Silvana Editoriale, 2013.
• Pablo Echaurren. Iconoclast. Text by Sandro Parmiggiani. Cinisello Balsamo (Milan), Silvana Editoriale, 2014.
• Pablo Echaurren. Contropittura. Texts by Kevin Repp, Angelandreina Rorro, Claudia Salaris, Arturo Schwarz with a letter by Gianfranco Baruchello. Cinisello Balsamo (Milan), Silvana Editoriale, 2015.
• Pablo Echaurren. Make Art not Money. Texts by Inés Ortega-Marquez, Arturo Schwarz, Angelandreina Rorro, Claudia Salaris. Santiago (Chile), Editores Impresores Ograma, 2016.
• Pablo Echaurren. Du champ magnétique. Works 1977-2017. Texts by Raffaella Perna, Kevin Repp, Claudia Salaris. Cinisello Balsamo (Milan), Silvana Editoriale, 2017.
• Marcel Duchamp Fountain. An Homage. Texts by Francis Naumann, Bradley Bailey. New York City, Francis Naumann Fine Art, LLC., 2017.
• Dwelling Dadaistically. Text by Mary Ann Caws in Oysters - East Hampton Architecture Review, pp. 2-3, New York, Architectural Body Research Foundation Inc., Summer 2018.
• Mary Ann Caws, Snail Time. Milan, Postmedia Books, 2018.

References