Eduardo Urculo; Spanish painter and sculptor; Independent UK obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Artist specialising in the hat, the suitcase and the female bottom
03 April 2003
Eduardo Urculo, paintor and sculptor: born Santurce, Spain 21
September 1938; married first Annie Chanvallon (one son; marriage
dissolved), secondly Victoria Hidalgo; died Madrid 31 March 2003.
If Eduardo Urculo did not exactly push at the envelope of pop art, his spicy
and accessible interpretation of the style nevertheless had a broad appeal
for the Spanish public. The various obsessions of his career became personal
signatures. They included the gentleman's hat; the enigmatic view of a
person's back turned as if fleeing; the female bottom; the suitcase and the
romantic paraphernalia of travel.
He is best-known for his 1992 sculpture of bronze bags and cases, a coat, a
hat and an umbrella, El Viajero ("The Traveller"), that forms a popular
rendezvous beneath the soaring 19th-century iron arches, now an atmospheric
palmhouse, of Madrid's Atocha railway station. Passengers stand or sit by
it, as if guarding their own luggage.
More provocative is his massive Culis monumentalibus, a female bottom four
metres high in the Asturian city of Oviedo in a square facing the Campoamor
Theatre where the Prince of Asturias prizes are awarded each year.
Urculo was born in the Basque country in 1938 but grew up in the Asturian
mining village of Langreo. He started painting at 14 when hepatitis and
tuberculosis laid him low for two years. At 17 he was illustrating gangster
comics in Oviedo, then won a grant in 1958 to study at the Circulo de Bellas
Artes in Madrid, where he flung himself into spiky socialist realism - "lots
of clenched fists and Guernica-style Picassoism". His early penchant for
black and white he attributed to lack of money and the influence of Goya. "I
got fed up to the teeth with all that."
He went to Paris, and in the early 1960s visited Germany, Denmark and
Sweden, relishing their liberating spirit while Spain suffocated under
dictatorship. In Stockholm he saw American pop for the first time. It was,
he said, "un flechazo" - love at first sight. Inspired, he burst into
vibrant colour. He travelled to Portugal, Morocco and Ibiza and began his
long celebration of the female body.
Urculo was a success from the start. Throughout the Seventies he explored
the female nude, emphasising the eroticism of "el culo", the backside, "the
most hidden, unmentionable zone". This was heady stuff for Spaniards
fighting for freedom of expression. He also favoured opulent still-lifes of
melons, tomatoes and aubergines.
But his defining image is the man whose face is hidden by a hat, his
raincoat and suitcase readied for departure. Urculo's love of hats dates
from youthful visits to the cinema, and he usually sported one in public.
"The hat symbolised luxury, seduction and elegance. It recalls a romantic
era that no longer exists and that I should like to revive," he said.
His painted and sculpted luggage with reinforced leather corners and chunky
clasps exudes a rugged Bogartian nostalgia. Cases, trunks, hatboxes and
battered Gladstone bags are accompanied with shoes or books, seeking to
convey the personality of their invisible owner. "Life is the image of the
romantic traveller, always turning away with his luggage. The face is what
least interests me about the body; the back is more universal," he reckoned.
Finally, Urculo revisited the austere angles of Cubism with still-lifes of
bottles (and cases and fruit) that echoed Juan Gris. A retrospective
exhibition recently toured the Far East with great success and he was
planning a show in New York, whose skyscrapers fascinated him.
The artist had a weak heart and suffered a fatal attack during lunch with
his wife, Victoria, and friends at Madrid's Residencia de Estudiantes -
briefly the home of his hero Salvador Dalí.
Elizabeth Nash