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
Julio Alpuy
b. 1919, Cerro Chato, Uruguay - d. 2009, New York City
Growing up in the Uruguayan countryside with little exposure to art, Alpuy first began drawing at the age of twenty. Within a year, the young artist met Joaquín Torres-García. Inspired by his theories on Constructive Universalism, Alpuy joined the Taller Torres-García.
In 1944, Alpuy painted two murals as part of the Taller's project to decorate the St. Bois Hospital in Uruguay. He would continue to paint murals throughout his career. Encouraged by Torres-García, Alpuy and other Taller members travelled to the Andean region of South America in 1945. This experience, along with other periods of travel during the 1950s in South America, Europe, and the Middle East profoundly affected his work. For Alpuy, nature functions as a framework for his archetypal personal symbolism, based on a fascination with the organic and the primordial.
In 1961, Alpuy immigrated to New York, where he remained for the duration of his life. Alpuy's work has been featured in numerous exhibitions about the Taller Torres-García, as well as in several international solo exhibitions. It is also included in major international collections, including: the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Morgan Library and Museum, New York; The Nelson A. Rockefeller Collection, New York; and the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo, Uruguay.
Please click for Chronology and CV
The South was Their North: Artists of the Torres-García Workshop
2015-2016 Autumn-Winter
Art Basel Miami Beach 2014
December 4-7, 2014
Line - Plane - Volume / Sculpture: 1944-2006
2006 Winter
Works ON & OF Paper - Modern and Contemporary
2005 Autumn
Julio Alpuy - Works of Wood and Drawings 1960-2003
2003 Autumn