Anarte Gallery

Retin

About Rodolfo Abularach

Guatemalan painter and printmaker. From 1954 to 1957 he studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Pl·sticas in Guatemala City while researching folk art for the DirecciÛn de Bellas Artes, but he was virtually self-taught and began as a draughtsman and painter of bullfighting scenes. In 1958 he travelled to New York on a Guatemalan government grant, prolonging his stay there with further grants, studying at the Arts Students League and Graphic Art Center and finally settling there permanently. He was influential in Guatemala until c. 1960, but because of his long residence abroad his wwork did not fit easily in the context of Central American art. Before leaving Guatemala he had painted landscapes and nudes in a naturalistic style, but he soon adopted a more modern idiom partly inspired by aboriginal Guatemalan subjects. After moving to New York, and especially from 1958 to 1961, his art underwent a profound transformation as he sought to bring together elements of abstract art and Surrealism and experimented with textures. From the late 1960s until the early 1980s, however, the artist dedicated himself to exploring an ingenious metaphor, representing through the magnification of the human eye and its infinite physical reactions a world that evolves in ever-changing moods and circumstances. These images are simultaneously elusive and eloquent, as indecipherable as the secrets of a human soul. In the 1980s he began to paint large landscapes characterized by a magical symbolism.