Discovering Gaston Ugalde: Bolivia Through the Eyes of the Andean Warhol

The Rebel of the Altiplano

Ugalde was a restless kind of genius. Over five decades, he created photographs, films, installations, land interventions and prints that defied easy classification – somewhere between satire and sanctity. He was neither figurative nor abstract; not quite conceptual either. His preferred term was “situations.”

His life and work were tightly intertwined. A self-styled hippie and natural adventurer, he rejected convention and hierarchy, pursuing not just art but a way of living freely. He was openly sceptical of institutions, hostile to orthodoxies, and frequently critical of what he saw as the co-opting of Indigenous identity for political gain.

He called out Bolivia’s political hypocrisies, and gained international notoriety with his controversial series of coca leaf paintings featuring Che Guevara, the Pope, Jesus, Fidel Castro – later given as presents to world leaders by Bolivian president Evo Morales.

In several of his situations, he introduced real people – not as bystanders, but as offerings. Naked, bound, positioned in ways that echoed both Catholic martyrdom and pre-Columbian sacrifice. In one, a man is tied feet-first to a wooden cross; in another, a figure lies curled on a glass slab, wrists and ankles bound. The question: who gets remembered, and how? Whose suffering is sacred? And whose image is being used, or misused, to tell the story of a nation?

An Outdoor Gallery: the Salar de Uyuni

Ugalde’s photographs, prints and installations have been exhibited across Latin America, Europe and North America, and are held in both private collections and public institutions.

Yet his most iconic works were made not in museums or studios, but in the white vastness of Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat on earth. This surreal setting became his outdoor gallery, a blank canvas for experimentation and contemplation.

Among his most iconic installations is the Stairway to Nowhere, a sculptural staircase built from blocks of salt, rising abruptly from the flats and leading into the sky. It still stands today, weathered by the elements but remarkably intact. For Ugalde, it was both absurd gesture and spiritual metaphor: a monument to ascent without destination.

Other works, now archived in photographs and film, involved arranging mirrored panels geometrically to reflect the sky and crust in perfect symmetry, and laying out vast spreads of handwoven fabric across the Salar, creating a floating textile mosaic that billowed with the wind. He staged scenes that looked like hallucinations, calling it a form of honda contemplación – deep contemplation.

Building a Legacy: The Gaston Ugalde Foundation

Helmed by his daughter Canela, the Gaston Ugalde Foundation is embarking on an ambitious project to preserve and build on his legacy. At the centre of their vision is Casa Gastón, a retreat and museum at the base of the Tunupa volcano, on land Gastón chose himself.

Designed by the artist before his death, it will be part retreat, part pilgrimage site, and part creative laboratory – a place where artists, travellers and thinkers can engage with the salt flats not just as a backdrop, but as a collaborator. The structure itself will be built from compressed salt and volcanic stone, aligned with the cardinal points, designed to absorb the shifting light of the Altiplano.

Three further retreat-residencies are planned, each one located in Bolivia’s most scenic locations.  “It’s a project that will mark a before and after in Bolivian tourism,” says Canela.

Alongside these physical spaces, the Foundation is developing a digital catalogue raisonné, curating pop-up exhibitions across Latin America, and offering fellowships to artists and researchers working with the themes Ugalde returned to time and again: land, identity, memory, resistance.