The work is a cast of a sculpture carved in burnt cactus wood

Raúl Farco

Raúl Farco is one of Argentina’s and Latin America’s best-known sculptors today. He was born in 1953 in Corrientes, Argentina, and trained as an architect at the University of Buenos Aires (Universidad de Buenos Aires). After graduating, sculpture became his principal artistic medium, and since the late 1970s he has worked internationally, establishing studios in several parts of the world.

His international career began in Zimbabwe, where he worked alongside sculptors associated with the so-called Shona sculpture tradition. Shona is the name of the ethnic group that makes up a large proportion of Zimbabwe’s population. Modern Shona sculpture has its roots in the country’s older traditions of stone carving and image-making and is particularly associated with hand-carved stone sculptures, in which the natural properties of the stone and its organic forms play a central role. His encounter with this tradition became an early and formative part of Farco’s artistic development.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Farco maintained his own studio in New York. Periods of work in Lanzarote, Madrid and Barcelona followed, before an extended stay in Carrara. During the 1990s, he returned to Madrid and New York and later established a larger studio in Mexico City, focusing, among other things, on bronze casting and working with onyx and marble. Since the 2000s, he has once again been based in Buenos Aires.

In 2010–2011, Farco became the second artist, after Alberto Gastón Díaz, to be selected by the City of Buenos Aires and Argentina’s Ministry of Culture to exhibit at Paseo de las Esculturas, the park outside the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. The exhibition comprised around twenty monumental sculptures, ranging from two to five metres in height.

For most of his career, Farco has been represented by Maman Fine Art Gallery in Buenos Aires and Miami. His works are held in collections including Museo del Barrio and the Queens Museum in New York, Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, Long Beach Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in Pretoria. His sculptures can also be found at venues including Palacio Duhau in Buenos Aires, The Hermitage Hotel and The Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood. In Sweden, his work has been shown in several gallery exhibitions during the 1980s and 1990s and is represented in private Swedish collections.

Among his more recent exhibitions and projects are the Buenos Aires Exhibition Center in 2023, Palacio Duhau in Buenos Aires in 2024, Maman Gallery in Buenos Aires in 2025, and the ongoing The House of Time Project, initiated in 2022.

Farco’s output is relatively limited. He works independently on original pieces, often on a large scale and involving technically demanding constructions. For Farco, form and artistic expression are the starting points. Technique and materials are adapted to the artistic concept and become integral to the expression of each work. Trends and commercial interests have never dictated the direction of his practice.

This auction presents a selection of Farco’s sculptural heads. The motif does not, in itself, constitute a distinct theme within his artistic practice; rather, the selection offers an opportunity to observe how he revisits a single subject and interprets it in different ways. The works demonstrate variations in form, construction and surface, with particular emphasis on the use of different metals as an active element in their structure and visual expression. Together, they offer a concentrated insight into Farco’s sculptural approach and his ability to create a range of expressions from one and the same underlying motif.