Eduardo Urculo Fernandez

Eduardo Úrculo Fernández - THE BRIDGE OF THE SWORD II

Biografía del Artista: Eduardo Urculo Santurce (Vizcaya), 1938 - Madrid, 2003 As a child, his family moved to Asturias, where he began painting without any previous artistic training. In 1957, he published his first illustrated strips in the Oviedo newspaper La Nueva España. Shortly afterwards, he moved to Madrid and began taking classes at the Círculo de Bellas Artes. In the capital, he worked illustrating stories for the magazine Triunfo, designing theatre sets and painting suburbs and shanty towns with an expressionist social content. He went to Paris in 1959, to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where two years later he began to work as a graphic designer for the Estudio Moro. The city of light gave him the opportunity to meet Eduardo Westerdahl, whose influence made his painting turn towards abstraction, although four years later he would return to a figurative style with a strong content of social criticism. Other illustrious figures he met were Man Ray, Max Ernst and Giacometti. His first contact with American pop came during a trip through northern Europe in 1967, resulting in a pop music marked by a realism based on very vivid colours and, in the 1970s, by its erotic, satirical and critical themes. He lived in New York in the 1980s, where he worked with Mario Vanarelli on the sets for the Colón opera house. Back in Paris in 1992, he created a space for the Cartier firm using his bronze sculptures of suitcases and golf clubs. Meanwhile, for the Mérida Classical Theatre Festival, he created the poster and set design for Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes. Suitcases, hats and nudes in the style of Japanese illustrations of the 17th and 18th centuries were always his main themes. In his later years he added the theme of the traveller confronted with the great modern cities, an ironic variation on the figure of the romantic nomad overwhelmed by natural landscapes. When he died, he was immersed in his own rediscovery of Cubism in still lifes, in which he used his usual themes and iconographies. Technically, he focused on the treatment of colour, volumes and geometrical interplays. This evolution in his career could be seen through the numerous individual exhibitions he held around the world since he arrived in Paris in 1959, to the retrospective exhibitions of his painting and sculpture at the Centro Cultural de la Villa in Madrid in 1997, and the retrospective exhibition of his graphic work in 2000 at the Museo del Grabado Español Contemporáneo in Marbella. Just when he died suddenly at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, an retrospective exhibition of his work organised by SEACEX was touring various countries. His works hang on the walls of the most important museums and modern art collections in the world, such as the Reina Sofía and the Juan March Foundation, among many others.