Sunday, December 6, 2020

José Luis (Joxe) Ulibarrena Arellano

José Luis (Joxe) Ulibarrena Arellano (1924 - 2020) was a Basque sculptor, ethnographer, and cultural promoter of Navarra.

When he was eleven years old, just after the Spanish Civil War broke out, Franco’s rebels shot his 46-year-old father and his 15-year-old cousin. He also saw three young men being shot at the Vuelta del Castillo in Pamplona, an image that will never be erased, according to himself.

In 1941 he began studying sculpture at the School of Arts and Crafts in Pamplona.

In 1950, with a grant from the Provincial Council of Navarra, he went to study at the School of Fine Arts in Paris.

Due to his opposition to Francoism, he went to Venezuela for seven years. There he worked on a monumental sculpture of a religious nature, at the same time that he developed his activity as a cultural promoter at the Basque Center in Caracas.

On his return to Navarra he created the Fundación Mariscal don Pedro de Navarra.

He died in Uterga at the age of ninety-six on April 20, 2020 at the home of one of his daughters as a result of pneumonia not associated with COVID-19.

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