Rodolfo Abularach

Rodolfo Abularach (born 1933, Guatemala City) is a Guatemalan painter, draughtsman and printmaker, regarded as one of Latin America's most distinguished masters. He is best known for the dramatic, meticulously worked images of the human eye that he began in the mid 1960s, close-up images that convey psychological and spiritual aspects of the person and hint at the mysteries of the psyche. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C., among many other museums worldwide.

He trained at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Guatemala City from 1947 to 1954, where he also researched folk art, studied engineering and then architecture at the Universidad de San Carlos, taking up abstract design at its Escuela de Arquitectura, and attended Pasadena City College in California in 1953. In his early years he worked as a draughtsman and painted bullfighting scenes, nudes and landscapes in a realist style. His first solo exhibition was at the Galería Nacional de Turismo in Guatemala City in 1947, and by 1956 he was teaching drawing and painting at the school where he had studied.

In 1958 he traveled to New York on a grant from Guatemala's Dirección de Bellas Artes to study at the Art Students League, and he extended his stay through a succession of grants: Guggenheim Foundation fellowships in 1959 and 1960, a Pan American Union grant to study printmaking at the Pratt Graphic Center from 1962 to 1964, and a period at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1966. He established his residence in New York. He remained influential in Guatemala into the early 1960s, but because of his long residence abroad his work did not fit easily in the context of Central American art. From 1958 to 1961 his art underwent a profound transformation as he brought together elements of abstract art and Surrealism and experimented with texture, for example in cross-hatched pen-and-ink drawings such as Fugitive from a Maya Lintel. Later he simplified his art and turned his attention to light as a substance emanating from within the work.

From the mid 1960s the Eye brought him international recognition, and he continued to explore it for almost two decades until, in the mid 1980s, he turned his gaze outward from the eye to the landscape, painting large landscapes characterized by a magical symbolism. He has held more than 90 solo exhibitions since 1947, from David Herbert Gallery in New York in 1961 to retrospectives at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Paiz in Guatemala City in 1997 and the Museo Santo Domingo in Antigua Guatemala in 2008, and his drawings and prints have been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bronx Museum and museums across Latin America, Europe and Japan.

He has received 38 awards, among them first prize in painting at the Certamen Centroamericano in Guatemala City in 1957, the acquisition prize in drawing at the fifth Bienal de São Paulo in 1959, first prizes in drawing in Madrid, Caracas, Cali and San Francisco, the silver medal of the Bienal Latinoamericana in Buenos Aires in 1987, an homage from the Municipalidad de Guatemala in 2003 and Artist of the Year from the Fundación Rozas Botrán in 2010. He has also taught and organized printmaking workshops in Costa Rica, Morocco and Colombia, took part in the restructuring of the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas de Guatemala in 1998 and became its director in 2000.