Pablo Echaurren

Although his name is not Italian, Pablo Echaurren was born in 1951 in Rome, where he currently works.
Against the early sixties background of the last throes of pop art, arte povera, minimalism and conceptual art, he elaborated his own code of expression, able to reach out beyond the art world. Since then his work has been a cross-pollution of genres, a mixture of high and low art and applied arts. From this stems an idea of the artist as all-around craftsman and inventor, indifferent to the barriers and hierarchies that usually tend to curb creativity.
His artistic career ranges from early watercolors and minimalist enamels to his canvases of the eighties and nineties, in which references to comic strips and graffiti, historical avant-garde movements, and the memory of pop art intersect, up to his more recent work, which mixes cartoons and figures rooted in popular culture, from gothic to pre-Columbian.
Moreover, Pablo Echaurren has published various pamphlets (including Il suicidio dell'arte, 2001) and novels on the world of contemporary art (like Delitto d'autore, 2003; L'invasione degli astratti, 2004). He has also busied himself with applied arts, leaving his mark on book jackets, newspaper illustrations, comic books, advertising, posters, records and CD covers, watches, stamps, moving back and forth between underground and overground.
In 2004 the Municipality of Rome dedicated to him the anthological exhibition Pablo Echaurren. Dagli anni Settanta a oggi, curated by Fabio Benzi, Gianluca Marziani, and Federica Pirani (Catalogue Gallucci).