Piero Atchugarry Gallery presents a contemporary art program and modern art survey, representing established artists from Latin America primarily, as well as from Italy, Japan and the United States. The artists represented by the gallery are linked by their emphasis on material and perfection of execution, working between sculpture and installation. In September of 2013, the gallery opened to the public with a Post-War Italian art exhibition. By January 2014 the gallery moved to a large stable adapted as an exhibition space in Garzón. The remote and pastoral environment that surrounded the gallery in Garzón allowed artists to explore outdoor and indoor situations, which ultimately influenced the gallery program to become experience-based.

In December 2018, Piero Atchugarry expanded his program to North America to a 9,000-squarefoot warehouse in Miami’s renowned Design District neighborhood. Like the former in Garzón, the Miami gallery’s layout transforms exhibition to exhibition. The gallery has a collaborative relationship with its artists, who are willing to undertake ambitious projects.
In 2019 Piero Atchugarry established the PA Takeover Program, organizing satellite exhibitions across the globe. The program challenges the gallery’s represented artists to think on their feet, adapting to new environments and creating site-specific exhibitions.

Lydia Okumura was born in São Paulo in 1948 to a Japanese immigrant family. Attending Japanese school in Brazil —Lydia had two distinct cultural influences that still resonate in her work. Her father Takashi, a prominent calligrapher, encouraged Okumura’s interest in art. Specializing in industrial ceramics and painting, which she displayed at her first solo exhibition at Varanda Galeria (1968). From 1970-1973, she attended Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, earning her Bachelor of Fine Arts. As part of the collective Equipe3, Okumura participated in the 1973 São Paulo Biennial, creating a site-specific abstract environment, Points of View. Upon receiving a four-year scholarship to the Pratt Graphics Center in 1974, she moved to New York city.

Okumura traveled to Japan in 1979 as a resident artist at Wako University, subsequently holding numerous exhibitions, including in Today’s Art of Brazil (1985)—at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Japan, where Okumura’s work was acquired for the Museum’s permanent collection. The previous year, Okumura had a solo exhibition at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art. Beginning in 1989, Okumura started working as a translator at the United Nations, simultaneously producing art at her studio in Union Square, New York.

Jillian Steinhauer reviews on Lydia Okumura ouvre on The Newyork Times (2018): “Lydia Okumura’s installations (…) connect the wall and the floor with geometric forms that evoke bodies moving through space”

READ MORE

Harriet Lloyd-Smith: The trio of pioneering female artists who took on minimalism in the 1960s and 70s on Wallpaper (2018): “The São Paulo-born Japanese artist draws inspiration from a number of sources such as land art and the anti-establishment wave of Arte Povera”

READ MORE

Between Force and Fragility: Lydia Okumura and the gendered nuances of Minimalist sculpture by Scotti Hill on Artist of South (2017): ”Her use of materials was at least initially fueled by mere necessity. Living and working in a small studio in New York City, she used found materials and experimented with ideas through elaborate sketches, hoping to be afforded the spatial luxury of transforming these works into three-dimensional sculptures”

READ MORE

Pablo Atchugarry is a sculptor with roots in drawing and painting. His father, Pedro, was a student of the founder of Constructive Universalism, Joaquín Torres García, which influenced Atchugarry as a young artist. He primarily worked in cement, iron and wood, holding his first exhibition in Montevideo in 1972, followed by his first international exhibition in Buenos Aires (1974). In 1979, he visited Carrara (Italy), famous for their marble, and created his first marble sculpture, La Lumière (c.1979). In 1982, he moved to Lecco and received a commission to carve a Pietá, now owned by Lecco’s Basilica of San Nicoló. His achievements as an artist were truly recognized when the Pablo Atchugarry Museum was opened in 1999.

Today, marble continues to be Pablo’s main medium, and he does not employ studio assistants for his sculptures; all of his works are executed by his own hand, reflecting the influence of Torres García’ Constructivism, paired with Figurative Expressionism. Atchugarry’s recent achievement is creating the Pablo Atchugarry Workshop and Foundation in Uruguay, whose mission is to introduce Fine Art education to children and young adults through public programs. He currently works in Lecco (Italy) and Manantiales (Uruguay).

Anne Tschida writes about Pablo Atchugarry on Miami Herald (2019): “This winter brings the stark and stunning show juxtaposing 20th-century modernist Louise Nevelson and 21st-century abstract sculptor Pablo Atchugarry. The works of the two dance together in a minimalist color-scape of the large foundation space”

READ MORE

Sarah Cascone: Pablo Atchugarry, Modern Master of Carrara Marble, Fits Right in Amid Roman Ruins on Artnet (2015): “With his monolithic works, Atchugarry creates dreamy marble visions that are both undeniably modern and inextricably linked to ancient and Renaissance art”

READ MORE

Contemporary artist Pablo Rasgado works through extraction -much of his past bodies of work are made from public walls, streets and refuse. The elements the artist removes from their original context distill his work with their history and formal qualities. We can say that Rasgado captures a moment frozen in time: though the origins of his samples may expire, his work creates a reconstruction that preserves their political and social context.

In 2019 he unveiled his solo exhibition, When the Symbols Shatter, at Piero Atchugarry Gallery in Miami. That same year he became eligible to apply for the esteemed grant from Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte del Fonca, and received the grant on his first application. Rasgado is a Member of the Sistema Nacional de Artes, Mexico, and has been a fellow of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2016), Bancomer-MACG Program (2012), by the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (2006, 2010 and 2011), and The Mex Am Fellowship (2007). Rasgado currently lives and works in Mexico city.

Sharon Mizota writes on Pablo Rasgado on Los Ángeles Times (2017): “To display the works, Rasgado has created a tight network of walls made from drywall recycled from other art exhibitions — mosaics of broken and battered pieces, some painted black or red”

READ MORE

En su trabajo Ventana (2019), Rasgado presenta un grupo de fragmentos de muro de ladrillos dispuestos sobre una pared distanciados uno de otros. De unos 133 por 168 cm la pieza parece reconfigurar un rectángulo. Ventana fue parte de la exposición When the symbols shatter (cuando los símbolos se rompen) que el artista realizó en la galería de Piero Atchugarry Gallery de Miami. La obra fue parte resultante de la residencia que Rasgado desarrollara durante 2019 en RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency). Un programa para artistas ubicado en un centro de reciclaje de materiales de construcción y demolición en Filadelfia (Estados Unidos). Rasgado trabajó un mes en la búsqueda, selección y construcción de sus obras utilizando los talleres y las maquinarias de dicho centro. Sobre cada uno de los fragmentos de muro que conforman Ventana, pintada con aerosol blanco una figura de un cuadrado con una cruz uniendo sus vértices insinúa la marca gráfica de un vano en la representación gráfica de la arquitectura.

No sabemos si es el artista quien ha hecho esta marca o si la marca ya estaba ahí en el muro al que pertenecen los fragmentos. Seguramente lo segundo, pero lo que sí podemos arriesgar es que entre el título y su representación material demuestra la intención de reconfigurar un espacio imaginario. Rasgado nos propone identificar momentos de ruptura, desplazamiento y dislocación; son estas historias parciales, de presentaciones imperfectas y confusas las que nos permiten recuperar potenciales del pasado perdidos, con la esperanza quizás de que puedan encontrar su resonancia en el presente. Pablo Rasgado trabaja sobre la recuperación de formas destruidas, las huellas que almacena o inclusive los métodos constructivos tradicionales en un intento simbólico por redimir del pasado aquello que vale la pena preservar.

Túlio Pinto is a contemporary Brazilian artist living and working in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Playing with gravity, he explores subtle balance of weight and matter through installations and sculptures. Using materials of opposing nature and behavior, he translates the pulse of the physical world to be reflected in the world of human relations. Stressing the material distinctions within his creations –pairing, as one example, steel with blown glass– Pinto subverts the expectations of these elements and seemingly transports them to a space where the rule of logic, mass and dimension no longer apply. Both imaginative and thought-provoking, Pinto shares with the viewer of his work a bit of his whimsy manifest in monumental forms.

Having only graduated from UFRGS with a degree in Visual Arts specializing in Sculpture in 2009, Tulio is incredibly focused and prolific. He is also a co-founder and member of the Atelier Subterrânea. In the past decade, the artist has created a distinct palette from which he creates: materials in their primordial forms, varied by their states of matter. Through this palette he reveals a material’s unseen potential in unexpected ways, conjuring striking juxtapositions between material and forces of gravity.

Felipe Bernardes Caldas interviews Túlio Pinto on Porto Arte: Revista de Artes Visuais (2018): “To be a professional artist is to be aware of all the roles and assemblages you have to fulfill so that the work you’re developing goes further, not only in the studio or in the mental studio, but in the arts circuit”

READ MORE

Iloboyou: Contemporary art by Tulio Pinto (2017): “It started from an idea of working with this very ordinary material, the balloon, which people already use for sculptures in general. Tulio wanted to generate a work that touched on questions of sculpture and drawing, depending on the graphic aspect, and that also brought a strong chromatic charge due to the color orange”

READ MORE