Sculptor from Navarre, born in Oderitz in 1942.
Since 1975, when he held his first exhibition in Arribe, he has participated in more than twenty group and individual exhibitions, mainly in different parts of the Basque Country and Navarre. Among them, his participation in the sculpture exhibition held at the Public University of Navarre in 1998, where he presented the work Homenaje a las Malloas, which was installed in the departmental building of Los Olivos and in which, as the artist himself explained, he sought to reflect the tradition of the farmhouses in the Araiz Valley of bringing grass from the Malloas with long cables, is particularly noteworthy.
In his work he always tries to recover the forms and customs of the rural environment in which he lives, and for this reason he uses natural materials, especially wood. He also understands sculpture as an art committed to the problems of his time. One of his public sculptures can be seen in the Ametzola park. It is a piece weighing fifty-six tons (a large limestone stone weighing 50 tons, a centenary chestnut tree weighing five tons and another ton of iron) and around five metres in height that make up the work Bidea, which will eventually be moved to the future Santi Brouard street in Bilbao, as it is a tribute to him.
As Jesús Ramos wrote in the catalogue that Juan Gorriti published for the exhibition El lápiz del carpintero (The Carpenter's Pencil) held in the summer of 2001 as part of the Cultur programme promoted by the Department of Tourism of the Government of Navarre:
"in his daily work Gorriti recovers wood that has aged with the passage of time, strips it bare, deepens its smoothness and nuances, bringing it back to life and presents us with art in raw wood without forgetting the past of that fibre that is still alive. Gorriti, recreating himself in wood, in his carving and composition of forms, offers us a vision of his work that goes beyond the object itself, evocative, full of cultural references, harmonising times, fusing technique and symbolism, overlapping one principle with another, achieving what is called the fourth dimension of sculpture".
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