Uruguayan sculptor Pablo Atchugarry.
The Atchugarry Museum of Contemporary Art (MACA), in Uruguay, opened its doors on the first Saturday of the year with an ambitious promise. As its website says, this place will seek in the coming years to "position Uruguay on the map of the great international exhibitions." A similar bet in the southern cone to that of MALBA, in Buenos Aires, but this time on the other side of the Río de la Plata. But the enormous museum – 5,000 square meters and whose shape simulates a ship – did not open its doors in the middle of the traditional art metropolises to enter that coveted map. It is not in Montevideo, the capital, nor in the tourist center of Punta del Este. Its founder is the renowned sculptor Pablo Atchugarry (Montevideo, 67 years old), who decided that MACA would be in a 40-hectare green field, away from urban noise,in an area known as Springs. It is on a road, further east of Punta del Este.
"Since I am a sculptor, and since I work with marble, which makes a lot of noise and a lot of dust, I chose a decentralized place," Atchugarry tells EL PAÍS about this rural space where the new museum is located and also his own workshop.
“Here there is native fauna, capybaras, foxes, hares, etc.
The museum wants to allow the public to dialogue with nature, and for us to remember that we are part of it”.
Exterior of the Atchugarry Museum of Contemporary Art, in Uruguay.MACA
Atchugarry started the history of his museum by fulfilling the ambitious promise. Its inaugural exhibition is the first posthumous retrospective of the two famous artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. "I never met them," says Atchugarry disappointed, who speaks of this exhibition as "a posthumous applause" for them. The retrospective, with some 50 works, was only exhibited once before Christo's death in 2020 [Jeanne-Claude passed away in 2009] and far from Uruguay: at the Pompidou in Paris.
"Not everyone can go to the Pompidou, so in a way this exhibition is a way of traveling, with the imagination, to all the incredible performances that the two of them put on," says the founder. The two artists were known for packing the Reichstag in Germany and the Pont Neuf in Paris with textiles, or installing thousands of blue umbrellas in a field in Japan, or placing more than 7,000 orange frames in New York's Central Park. Recently, in the summer of 2021, a relative posthumously fulfilled their dream of packing the triumphal arch in Paris. Sketches, drawings, photos, plans and collages of those spectacular works in the world's metropolises are now on view in Manantiales, Uruguay.
And it is that the MACA is thought like this: as a museum that connects the southern and northern hemispheres, local art with international art, the frenzy of the urban metropolis with the calm of the rural space.
“I am interested in relating artists at the time with what was being done in other environments, in other places, because art is all closely related”, says the founder.
“It is interesting to discover what was done in the 1960s in Paris, in New York, in Buenos Aires, in Mexico or in Montevideo.
The idea of the museum is that, always look for relationships with the works of the artists”.
The work 'L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped' by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.MACA
The museum currently houses in its collection more than 100 works by Uruguayan, Latin American, American and European artists, all from the founder's personal collection. There are works by the Venezuelan Jesús Soto (representative of kinetic art), the Russian Louise Nevelson (known for her monochrome sculptures), or the American Frank Stella (an icon of abstract art). “Above all, abstraction and kinetic art are very well represented,” says Atchugarry of the entire collection. Of the 63 artists there, 12 are Uruguayan, including, for example, two representatives of non-figurative art in the country, Maria Freire and José Pedro Costigliolo. "Uruguay has a very rich history of artists," says the founder. “It is a country with a small population but a very big heart.”
The architect of the museum where all these works are located is Carlos Ott, a Canadian and Uruguayan artist recognized for having designed the Opera Bastille in Paris in the 1980s.
“He is the capital of this ship,” the founder says of Ott and of the museum's wooden figure, which, in his interpretation, “is like an ark that is about to carry our dreams.
Ott is an architect but I say that he is actually a sculptor”.
The rural terrain where the museum is located is undulating and so is the structure.
"It's like a wave in the landscape," says the founder.
The nephews of the founder, engineers who are heirs to a construction company, were in charge of carrying out the works.
Atchugarry knows that the landscape – the 40 hectares with skunks and capybaras – is largely the attraction of the museum. There the public can walk through a permanent exhibition of 71 sculptures where there are not only works in marble by the founder but also by more than two dozen Uruguayan, Latin American, and European artists. Cast aluminum sculptures of red dogs hang from pine trees (
Let's Play in the Forest
, by Argentinean Janinne Wolfsohn, 2011); a bronze violin splits in two on top of a drumstick (
Viola D'Amore
, by the Italian Aldo Mondino, 1985); a huge red iron snake approaches the lake of space (
Anaconda
, by the Uruguayan Octavio Podestá, 2011).
Slightly brighter, a golden fiberglass bear greets the public through the trees (
Gold Bear
, by the Italian collective Cracking Art).
The work 'Gold Bear', by the Cracking Art collective, is in the International Sculpture Park.MACA
"Many artists [sculptors] have made a specific project for the place," says the founder.
“For example, the Italian artist Eduard Habicher made an abstract structure, which looks like a kind of boat, in the middle of the lake.
The works have been the fruit of dialogues, of encounters.
Many times artists have come and want to place their work here”.
Atchugarry, who lives between Italy and Uruguay, is internationally recognized above all for his work of abstract sculptures with white and Italian Carrara marble. The sculptor has exhibited in almost all the great artistic metropolises (Paris, London, New York, among others) and there is currently a retrospective of his work at the Royal Palace in Milan. He went to Europe young, he moved to the Italian city of Lecco to live near the mountains of Lombardy, but since 2007 he decided to start the Pablo Atchugarry Foundation as the first seed of the museum that opened this year in the green Manantiales.
“Many years ago this was nothing,” Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou said of the site of the new museum on the day of its inauguration. He attended there among dozens of other political personalities such as former President Pepe Mujica. "And as always, it is the creators, the people who think beyond what exists, the one who transgresses the limits of reality with imagination, who saw that here could be what we are all enjoying today," added the president about the sculptor
A green place where skunks currently coexist with Christo and Jeanne-Claude, or sculptures of golden bears with kinetic art paintings.
Pablo Atchugarry often says that sometimes it is nature that determines your destiny and not the other way around.
“In fact, between the material and the artist there is a kind of dialogue that is established,” the sculptor told a magazine published in 2019. “It is not the artist who chooses the material, but vice versa, it is also the material who chooses the artist and directs him to his beauties and his imperfections”.
Nature, perhaps, chose Uruguay this time as a promise of contemporary art.
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