Born in Guatemala in 1933, he began his formal art training at the Escuela National de Artes Plásticas in Guatemala City in 1946, and later attended the Escuela de Arquitectura there, where he studied abstract design. In 1958 he traveled to New York on a grant from the Dirección de Bellas Artes of Guatemala. and extended his stay through a succession of grants, establishing his residence in that city which continues to this day. Beginning in the mid 1960’s he won international recognition with his dramatic images of the human eye. For almost two decades he continued meticulously to explore the “Eye” until, in the mid 1980’s, Abularach changed the inward focus of his gaze from the eye, outward to the landscape.

He has participated in a myriad of one-man shows dating since 1947 and has won numerous awards, starting in 1959 with First Prize in painting at the Certamen Nacional de Ciencias, Letras y Bellas Artes, in Guatemala and the Acquisition Prize at the fifth Biennial of Sao Paolo, Brazil. Abularach's works are part of many important collections.

Permanent Collections (selection)

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC
Museo Cuevas, Mexico City.
Museum of International Contemporary Graphics, Fredrikstad, Norway.
Museum of Art, Cairo, Egypt.
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia.
Museum of Modern Art, Bogota, Colombia.
Museum of the University of Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico.
Museum of Fine Arts, Caracas, Venezuela.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California.
Museum of Modern Art, Guatemala City, Guatemala.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Fleming Museum, Vermont.
Museum of Art and History, Geneva, Switzerland.
County Museum, Los Angeles, California.
National Museum of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.
Museum of Art, Baghdad, Iraq.
Panarte Museum, Panama.
The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Museo del Barrio, New York.