Biscayan painter, born in Bilbao on December 29, 1898. He died in Bilbao in 1976.
A disciple of Manuel Losada , he learned drawing from the caricaturist "Bon," who also introduced him to clay sculpture. Following the advice of his uncle, the painter Juan de Echevarra , in 1922 he moved to Paris, where he attended academies and was accompanied by colleagues including Genaro Urrutia , José Benito Bikandi , and the woodcarver Mateo Hernández. In his studio he took up wood carving, while also receiving valuable advice from the sculptor and ceramist Francisco Durrio .
He hung several paintings in the Café La Rotonda in Montparnasse, a meeting place at the time for the most prestigious international painters, whose walls were reserved exclusively for new artists. After a long period in Paris - to which he returned on several occasions - he moved to Belgium and Holland with the aim of studying Flemish painters in depth, and from there, passing through the capital of France again, he returned to Spain a short time later, taking up residence in Bilbao, where he continued producing his paintings, but in seclusion, without deciding to his canvases to the world, considering that his signature was not yet mature.
At the urging of his friends, in December 1947, and abandoning his seclusion, he held his first solo exhibition in San Sebastián at the Municipal Art Gallery, hanging 68 works, the most representative of his different periods, achieving notable success. In 1948, 1963, 1966 and 1967 he again exhibited his works at the Bilbao Art Gallery, receiving good reviews and popular acclaim. In 1951 he participated in the First Hispano-American Art Biennial held in Madrid. The 1960s were his period of greatest exhibition activity.
The author of over 500 oil paintings and a large number of drawings, watercolors and pastels, life sketches, and posters, his impasto palette knife paintings were highly valued in French artistic circles. He had a predilection for landscapes and open-air painting, also specializing in figure and still life paintings, as well as clay sculpture and wood carving. He experimented with trends such as Cubism, abstraction, and Symbolism, eventually developing his own style.
Among his most important works we can highlight La cocotte, Fishermen's Quarter, Ella, Gypsy Camp, Orio, Saint Gueda, Primaveral, Le Domme or Winter Ballad .
Joaquín de Zuazagoitia (Bilbo, 1966), sees it like this:
"Uru uela takes reality as a medium to exalt color. The line, the drawing, concerns him more as an arabesque, without false or affected styles, than as a transcription of reality. It is what melody is in music. Color is a furious full orchestra. Hence his painting is balanced and exalted at the same time. It corresponds to his timid and determined temperament -not incompatible- with a certain intimate melancholy that involuntarily leaves in the work an attractive poetic nostalgia."
Mario Ángel Marrod n (Bilbo, 1974):
"Uru uela, a painter of purple, violet, violet and lilac colours. One of these chromaticisms always centrally dominates the composition, giving more mastery, predominance and interest to the colour than to the mathematical composition of the canvas. With this he breaks up rough edges, establishes the harmonic tones required by each painting, better combines the intonations, is more poetic in his pastiness, and - above all - holds and ties the thousand chromatic songs of his easel."
I aki Viar Ponte (Bilbo, 1974):
"He does not use the model with the idea of transferring it to the canvas with brushstrokes, but only as a starting point to let his fantasy fly; not on the wings of rhythms and laws of stylization conducive to decorative painting, which is the current way of fantasizing in art, but with impulses of an irrepressible unconscious emotionality, whose results, perhaps, are first to surprise the author himself."
Álvarez Emparanza ( Contemporary Basque Painting ; Donostia, 1978):
"Uruuela's art has a marked post-impressionist sign, both in its subject matter and its ution, with striking colors, playing with different techniques as in the case of the Parisian paintings, in which a greater fluidity in the brushstroke and soft intonation can be observed."