Que Pasa en el Cajon, 1994

By Ignacio Iturria

36” x 30”

Mixed media on canvas

I’m nuts over Ignacio Iturria. He’s probably the best-known Uruguayan painter of his generation. And yet his paintings are amazingly inexpensive. Que Pasa en el Cajon (above) is the first of his works that I purchased many years ago. Its retail value was maybe $18,000 to $20,000, but Suzanne managed to buy it from a financially distressed private collector for less than half that. I wouldn’t sell it for $30,000 today.

Since then, I’ve purchased five more of Iturria’s works. One thing that bodes well for the future of his pricing: He has a large North American fan base. In fact, more than 50% of his sales are in the USA.

About Ignacio Iturria

Born on April 1, 1949 in Montevideo, Uruguay, Ignacio Iturria studied commercial art and graphic design before dedicating himself to painting. He traced his roots to the Basque region of Spain, and in an effort to connect to his Spanish heritage, spent several years in a small seaside town near Barcelona. But upon returning to Uruguay, he embraced the landscape of his birthplace, especially the murky Río de la Plata, a visually dominant feature of Montevideo’s landscape.

Iturria works with thick paint and sometimes collaged textures with muddy-brown colors, often including toy-like figures in box-like enclosures. “People say I paint the human condition,” he has said. “But what I paint is a place’s psychological state, and that’s why I need to be here.”