Cecilia de Torres, Ltd.
Julio Alpuy - Works 1963-1993 1994 Summer
Julio Alpuy - Works 1963-1993
In 1963, in New York City, Alpuy began working with wood in a new way, opening a path to the successful plastic realization of his own world. The wood reliefs and watercolors presented in this exhibition are a testament to Alpuy's investigation of the primordial and his mastery of a very personal expression.
"That sentiment of abstraction that comes to us from Cézanne through the cubists and that, in my case,
I inherited directly from Torres-García, was a profoundly spiritual process that forced those artists to penetrate very deeply to extract the essence of every true work of art. Reality is transposed into a plastic equivalent: an abstraction. The quality of things is replaced by the plastic quality of the colors of the palette. And so, in painting, reality or Nature leave their world and enter the world of creation. In continuing that discipline and going more and more deeply into the problem, the artist creates his own technique. His own way of saying and doing. His own style. And that is the only valid technique."
- Julio Alpuy
American, born in Tacuarembó, Uruguay, 1919. Lived in New York City from 1961 until his death in 2009.
Introduced to Joaquín Torres-García in 1940, Alpuy joined his atelier and in 1943, began teaching at the TTG under Torres-García’s direction. In 1944, Alpuy painted two Constructivist Murals for the Saint Bois Hospital, one now at the College of Architecture. In 1949, he executed several mural commissions in mosaic for the architects Leborgne and De Leone and for Torres-García’s home. In 1950s, interspersed by trips to Europe, the Middle East and Chile, and two years in Bogotá and Caracas, Alpuy continued to teach at the El Taller and work professionally. He executed a series of large mural paintings for the architect Payssé Reyes, the Larrañaga Lyceum and for the YMCA headquarters in Montevideo.
In 1961, Alpuy immigrated to New York City, where he died in 2009. He received a 1961 Fellowship from The New School for Social Research. Alpuy was awarded a mural commission for the new Uruguayan Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1980, and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1983), the New York Council for the Arts (1986), and the Gottlieb Foundation (1990). Alpuy has had numerous one-person exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows for nearly sixty years. In 1999, the Municipal government in Montevideo honored Alpuy with a retrospective exhibition that then traveled to Buenos Aires. Alpuy’s work is in major public and private collections internationally.
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