Ignacio Iturria

"Ignacio Iturria was born in Motevideo, in 1949. He grew up in the Uguguayan capital and studient commercial art and graphic design there before turning full-time to painting and fine art. Iturria traces his family roots to the Basque region of Spain; during the 1980s, he and his family spent several years living in a town on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, but inevitably he returned to his homeland. Over the years, Iturria's art has dramatically evolved from the playful drawings of his earliest years as an artist to his spare, bleached-out images from his period in Spain. Since that time, the artist has developed his mature style, with its strong, personal vocabulary of earthy colors and dreamy-whimsical, memory-provoking, history-laden characters who have become the hallmarks of his deeply poetic and humanistic art. Iturria has exhibited his work throughout South America and Central America, in the United States and Canada, in Europ and Japan. In 1995, he won a major aquisition prize at the Venice Biennale. In recent years, in addition to regular solo and group shows at Praxis Internation Art's galleries in New York and South America, and at major international art fairs, Iturria'swork has been featured in solo exhibition at the Sixth Havana Biennial; the Museum of Modern Art in Bogota, Colombia; the Museum of the Americas in San Juan, Peurto Rico; Plug-in, an arts center in Winnipeg, Canada; the North Dakota Museum of Art; and other museums. Major exhibitions of Iturra's work, which will include paintings, sculptures and mixed-media constructions, art scheduled for 1998 at the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico city and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The artist lives with his wife and children in a suburb of Montivideo, where he also maintains his studio."