Ignacio Iturria

I found this painting of Iturria's on the internet a few years ago. I have never seen the actual painting though I am familiar with other works by this contemporary artist. I used to work in the State Department in Washington, DC, and would wander around the surrounding neighborhood during my lunch hour. An exhibit at the Museum of the Americas nearby was featuring an exhibit on Iturria. It was wonderful (though some of his pictures had a few conservation problems). The surfaces were very painterly, very brown -- kind of a modern, whimsical take-off on Rembrandt. The subject matter was crazy -- funny, child-like, imaginative. The scale was large -- and large in a way that means something. His skyscrapers on tabletops seem the size they should be -- actually they seem "life-size," though that is a bit of a paradox.

After we got a computer and I started surfing the internet, Iturria was one of the artists I looked for. After the exhibit but before my introduction to the internet, I knew his work only from ArtNews magazine where it was being advertised by Praxis. Now we can "google" him and see images, and meanwhile our local modern museum, the Hirshhorn, has added one Iturria to its collection though not a particularly good one.

Would that the Hirshhorn had been able to buy this one! Click on the image to see it enlarged enough to spy a cow giving milk into one of the cups. In the "art world" where "edgy-ness" rules, Iturria seems to be one of the few serious contemporary artists humane enough to use humor -- and to use it plainly, unapologically and with wonderful kindness.