Biography and Works of Raúl Urrutikoetxea

San Sebastian 1962 - 2002

He studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of the Basque Country, becoming at the time of his early death one of the greatest exponents of Basque painters, framed in a realism very far from a mere photographic representation of reality, capturing the motif with a very particular vision, charged with melancholy.

Raúl Urrutikoetxea has gathered with his painting a prodigious inventory deferred from the real.

“What is seen is not always what it seems”" such a maxim was repeated by Raúl. In the second half of the eighties the painting of this artist, even though his constructive poetics had already been defined quite precisely, was still ascribed to the hyperrealism or magic realism that he had in Antonio López as the most recognized preceptor of that tradition, started several decades ago in the Spanish context. But the channel of his painting was looking for unpublished, different courses. Beyond the formal meticulousness that his paintings, drawings and engravings conveyed, the substance lay in his melancholic desire to hunt sensations and that evening light that is so present in his images.