Eduardo Urculo

Eduardo Úrculo

(Santurce, 1938 - Madrid, 2003) Spanish painter. Determining 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 top representatives. Although throughout his artistic career he went through different styles, from the social expressionism of his beginnings to the neocubism of some paintings of the last 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 made countless exhibitions, some of them as important as the one that in 1997 he dedicated the Cultural Center of the Villa de Madrid or the anthological exhibition that in 2000 offered him the Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas.

Eduardo Úrculo

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

In this town he spent his childhood, which, like that of many other post-war Spanish children, was marked by the high cost and the forced straits of those difficult years. In 1948 he entered the secondary school, but four years later he left the studies to start working as a topography assistant in a mining company.

Even so, the years he spent in that center were not in vain, since that was where his interest in drawing arose 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 reproductions of poor quality that I began to familiarize myself with paintings I had never seen," he would say years later, recalling his adventurous artistic beginnings.

In 1954, because of severe hepatitis, he had to stay in bed for about nine months, a circumstance that he took advantage of to devote more time to the study of drawing and painting. Once he had recovered from his illness and returned to his old job, he began to paint - in the manner of his admired Impressionist painters - the houses, the nooks and crannies 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 sample, Langreo City Council granted 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 very poor environment of factories and suburbs with a clear intention to denounce. The works pertaining to this time have been cataloged by the critic like "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 he had apprehended as a child through the black and white images of illustrated books.

In 1960 military service took him to Western Sahara first and a year later to the Canary Islands. In Tenerife he became friends with 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, served him, nevertheless, to enrich plastically his painting and acquire greater ease in the technique and the treatment of the matter. In February of 1962 he traveled again to Paris, where he resumed the figurative expressionism and the themes of social background that had characterized his first works.

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

The "erotic era"

His painting immediately imbued the postulates of pop art, which technically resulted in the abandonment of oil by acrylic and 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: its maximum referent became the female body, which, already already fragmented, represented in suggesre.