NEW YORK, NY.- David Nolan Gallery announced its first solo show of one of Latin America’s most significant yet under recognized artists, Rodolfo Abularach (Guatemalan, 1933-2020). This is the first full-scale gallery exhibition in New York to explore the breadth of the artist’s work.
Rodolfo Abularach: A Cosmic Vision is a bicoastal collaboration with Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills, where a simultaneous presentation of Abularach’s work will be on view from June 26 through August 9. Along with these concurrent exhibitions, David Nolan Gallery and Marc Selwyn Fine Art are pleased to announce publication of the first major monograph dedicated to the artist, for which art historian, writer, and curator Gavin Delahunty, artist and curator Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer, and curator Rudy F. Weissenberg have contributed insightful essays.
Throughout his over six-decade-long career, Abularach created a fascinating spiritual world filled with images of planetary forms, mandalas, and earthly and psychological portals. His most famous subject was the eye, which he saw as a window into the soul. His interest in the mysteries of the earth also led him to depict volcanoes, emblems of the artist’s Guatemalanhomeland and ancient history. Abularach mastered and explored a variety of styles, from hyperrealistic to abstract, monochrome to multicolored, esoteric to surreal. He was known for his virtuosity in multiple media, including painting, drawing, and printmaking.
The exhibitions at David Nolan Gallery and Marc Selwyn Fine Art will highlight the major themes Abularach explored throughout his career. A selected group of works on paper and paintings will illustrate the artist’s evolution from enigmatic circular forms and abstract mandalas to the human eye in all its possible variations, and dramatic depictions of volcanic eruptions, inspired by Dante’s Inferno and Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiché Maya People.
Abularach was a classic, a modern, geometric painter; a figurative painter; but above all, he is unclassifiable. He communicated with the firmament and discovered the star we all carry in our faces: the eye. That eye which, when the eyelid is closed, is the entrance to the inner world… There is a unique zeitgeist in Abularach’s paintings—a revisitation of Western and Mesoamerican myths blended with an allusion to Eastern practices, such as meditation, and Western psychedelia. What he produced would levitate and transcend any territory and time period. His works hypnotize; they capture our sight like a pendulum. - GABRIEL RODRÍGUEZ PELLECER, “Cosmic Abularach: Portrait of the Artist as a Mystic,” 2025
His work fluidly intertwines Mesoamerican symbolism, Renaissance precision, and Surrealist anthropomorphism, in addition to expressing spiritual and metaphysical ideals… Abularach once described his “eye” as a symbol of ascension and liberation—a physical organ that nevertheless has the ability to transcend the limits of the human body. Visionary and omniscient, Abularach’s eyes survey vast swathes of art history and visual culture, condensing the artist’s extraordinarily rich range of references into each keenly focused image. - GAVIN DELAHUNTY, “An Ocular Imagination,” 2025
A practitioner of Tantric Buddhism and meditation, Abularach was equally influenced by the Mayan traditions and cosmic vision (2 Círculos - Armonía y Contraste, 1965 and Aparición - Centro No. 1, 1971). His compositions from the 1960s were innovative abstractions informed by Mayan stelae, where the artist used light as a vehicle to create space where forms could float.
" Estela: I took this title from the vertical stone sculptures that the Mayans made. For them, it was a way of recording the most important events, such as astronomical dates. In my drawing, it is a luminous frontal and vertical composition, like an apparition in a mystical, poetic sense. It is like a light imprisoned. The technique I used allowed for a luminous impression. It is also like a luminous apparition through a doorway-the forms float in space, almost suspended by the light. Above, a circle-almost a frontal eye or a black disk, like an eclipse. " - Rodolfo Abularach
From these abstracted landscapes, Abularach concentrated on an orb that eventually took the form of a human eye (Ojo Centro Blanco No. 7, 1970). He once described his "eyes" as "a symbol of liberation, ascension, and peace. Forms emerging from darkness into light." The eye served as an icon for a multi-dimensional exploration of inner and outer worlds, which Abularach rendered in his spectacular depictions that varied from realistic to geometric, abstract, uncanny, and mystical.
Abularach made his ink drawings with a tightly woven texture, an exquisite cross-hatching he achieved with a pen, giving the illusion of sfumato. These works convey the artist's meditative state; they were drawn mainly at night and seem to reflect the glittering light of a candle (Circe No. 3, 1969 and Olimpia, 1979).
In various mythologies, eyes are often symbols of celestial or cosmic deities; in religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, the third eye represents the ability to perceive beyond the limitations of the physical senses and access higher realms of consciousness. Abularach moved from the terrestrial to the celestial in his Cósmico No. 3 - Aleluya (1977) where the iris of an outsized eye reflects concentric cloud formations that float around a dense black aperture. In this eye of the sun, with the moon as a pupil forming an eclipse, the artist explored the concept of the "eye as a universe" and treated the human eye as a miniature representation of the vast cosmos.
Like the eye, the volcano - another energy portal - came to Abularach from an extraordinarily rich iconographic and literary tradition. It is hard to tell if what we see in his work are the volcanoes of Guatemala or the textures of the artist's imagination (Noche, 1992). Regardless of the time they were made, Abularach's mandalas, eclipses, volcanic eruptions, and eyes were all shaped and intertwined by light, fire and heat.
