Héctor Urra

“On Metaphors and Metamorphoses”

In the work of the painter and sculptor Héctor Urra (Pamplona, 1973), each figure is a territory in flux: a body that fragments, reassembles itself and is reimagined to speak of that which defines us as human beings. In “On Metaphors and Metamorphoses”, the artist brings together a series of paintings that consolidate his personal “archaeology of feelings”—a persistent exploration of concepts such as fragility and the passage of time.

Trained in painting and sculpture, Héctor has made gesture and the physical process central to his identity. In his hands, wood, stone and pigment are not merely materials: they are rhythms, breaths, doubts and certainties that are inscribed as layers of an emotional biography. His sculpture, composed of fragments that are glued, assembled and carved, reveals the pulse of time; his painting combines splashes of colour, textures and texts that evoke the tradition of the altarpiece and the echo of the classics.

In this constant dialogue between disciplines, the figures inhabit a space between the real and the symbolic. These elements prompt questions and transform each work into an invitation to pause and look within, to find in the fracture a form of truth and beauty.
Urra revisits ornamentation, symbolism and classical references—Sappho, the Muses, the still life—not out of nostalgia, but as a recognition of the creative lineage that precedes us. ‘Of Metaphors and Metamorphoses’ is, in this sense, a tribute to other creators and to the human impulse that has persisted throughout the centuries: that desire to imagine and transform.

With a career spanning more than three decades, the artist continues to view creation as a vital journey, a continuous learning process that never comes to an end. His intimate works remind us that we are capable of building the extraordinary, but also of breaking ourselves; that we inhabit a fragile time, yet that in dedication, and in the act of creating, lies a luminous form of resistance.

In this exhibition, metamorphosis is not merely a theme: it is the very condition of art and of the human being. An invitation, in Urra’s own words, to look with “an open mind, a willingness to imagine and dream”, so that we may encounter—even if only for an instant—that which makes us more sensitive, more aware and, perhaps, freer.