Winning a youth competition gave him the ticket to Paris that prompted him to enter, as a self-taught artist, into a world that has trapped him until the last moment. On Friday he inaugurated his last exhibition, in Soraluze, while preparing to receive this summer in … his house in Alkiza, in Ur Mara, to visitors who every year want to discover a unique museum, which combines art, thought and nature. But this personal refuge, Koldobika Jauregi’s masterpiece, is the culmination of a prolific 40-year career that began in 1978 when he began to be interested in sculpture, and self-taught but with the help of the painter Jesús Gallego, he presented a work in a competition in Donostia that he won and convinced him that his thing was to be a sculptor.
From there he began a career in which he has created hundreds of works, distributed not only at home, in his native Alkiza, and in other towns in Gipuzkoa, but also in different countries around the world such as Japan or Germany. He began with his first individual exhibitions in 1982, in Elduain and Lizartza. And two years later he inaugurated his first sculpture in a public place in Donostia, in Martutene Park. From there he expanded his prestige and embraced new techniques that led him, for example, to learn marble sculpture in Carrara, Italy or, in 1990, to become a disciple of Chillida with the Zabalaga scholarship. With the master, he shared a project in Germany in 2000 and this year, on the occasion of the centenary, he chose that work made of wood ‘Altxatzeko harria’, as a tribute.
Winning the Zabalaga scholarship brought him together with maestro Chillida, with whom he shared a project in Germany in 2000.
Jauregi’s work is not only limited to sculptures, whether in stone, marble, iron or wood, he also leaves an extensive artistic legacy with bas-reliefs, drawings, collage, silkscreens, jewelry and performance. In Donostia, one of his most notable works that can be seen in Intxaurrondo is ‘Shapes in Growth’, an 8 meter high sculpture made up of three zoomorphic pieces at the base and a central totem.
One of his most international stages occurred between 1996 and 2000 when he worked alongside German artists in an experimental project called ‘Art Parallel to Nature’, invited by the Insel Hombrich Museum. In Germany, he has exhibited many of his works and has participated in the Frankfurt Book Fair or the Cologne Fair of Graphic Art.
San Telmo in 1991 and the Guggenheim Museum in 2007 dedicated important individual exhibitions to him.
Some of his most relevant ‘home’ exhibitions were the one that San Telmo dedicated to him in 1991, or the one he starred in at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, ‘Laboratories. Looks around the permanent collection: Koldobika Jauregi’, in 2007.
During his career he has held more than thirty individual exhibitions in large museums but also in small galleries such as Oreka Art, the last one which opened in Soraluze on Friday. And together with other artists he has collaborated in group exhibitions. One of these shared works can be seen in the arkupes in the Plaza Euskal Herria in Tolosa, where in January he inaugurated some murals with Hernández, Epelde and Longarón.
