Pablo Echaurren


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.

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.
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. 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. 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, a section of the far left that in 1977 adopted the aesthetic languages of the artistic avant-garde.
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.
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.
On March 26, 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.
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.
He recently participated in two exhibitions-tribute to Marcel Duchamp held at the Francis Naumann Fine Art in New York: Marcel Duchamp. An homage and Depicting Duchamp.

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