He was born in Cerro Largo, Uruguay, on August 25, 1930. He was a Uruguayan artist, outstanding in textile art, theater actor and teacher. He is considered the inaugural artist in the history of Uruguayan tapestry. His work, hidden in private collections after his death, is made public in a book and in a retrospective exhibition of his work, on the initiative of a group of former students from Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina in 2013. He showed interest in different areas of artistic creation and performance since his youth: he designed masks, clothes, furniture and ventured into theater, dance and film. Between 1957 and 1971 he acted and taught at the independent theater with outstanding casts and directors at El Galpón, TCM and Teatro del Centro. The inclination towards upholstery was favored by an exhibition of French Gobelins in 1957 and the first exhibition of Polish upholstery in 1965, held in Montevideo. He also recreates photographic portraits in drawing on canvas and bastille. Training: In 1957 he graduated from the Instituto de Profesores Artigas (Montevideo, Uruguay) in the specialty of drawing and studied in the Faculty of Humanities at UDELAR with Fernando García Esteban, Jorge Romero Brest and Julio Payró. His training was influenced by the generation of '45, with professors such as Ángel Rama, Carlos Real de Azúa, Carlos Quijano, Antonio Grompone, Fernando García Esteban, Atahualpa del Cioppo and artists such as Juan Carlos Onetti, Carlos Martínez Moreno, Armonía Somers, José Cúneo, Joaquín Torres García, Germán Cabrera, Manuel Espínola Gómez. He was self-taught in the technique of tapestry since there was no indigenous legacy of textile art in Uruguay and very little from the colonial era, so he based himself on the domestic production of the rural environment made on creole looms with fleece wool and some isolated experiences of tapestry, with which he was able to recreate the high gobelin. At the beginning of the tapestry in Uruguay, in the absence of local tradition, the tapestry makers gave their works an artistic status, with pictorial contents, going beyond the merely decorative. The texture of the fiber is the material used for the creation of a genre derived from hyper-realism: the portrait-tapestry. Academic activity: He was a teacher of Drawing and Plastic Expression in Secondary Education, and of textile art in the Montevidean Tapestry Workshop, created by him in 1967, through which he created links with other institutions in Buenos Aires (Argentina), Porto Alegre and Sao Paulo (Brazil), where he taught tapestry techniques. He gave courses in Art History at the El Galpón Theater and in Gobelin technique in one of the five fundamental workshops of the National School of Fine Arts. He integrated diverse materials and fibers that initiated the experimental three-dimensional technique in the line of the nouvelle tapisserie. He started the Encounters of Tapestry, the first of which was held in 1973 and which continue to be held every two years until the present. From that year until 1985, during the military dictatorship in Uruguay, the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes was closed, which is why Aroztegui taught privately, to avoid censorship, prohibitions and persecutions. In 1982 he was part of the Uruguayan Tapestry Center (CETU) which brought together many tapestry makers. Once democracy was restored, the School of Fine Arts began to function again and Aroztegui joined it by competition in 1987, as a teacher of one of the five fundamental workshops. Work: After his death, his works (except for the one belonging to the Blanes Museum) remain in private collections, for which reason they are not publicly known nor can they be studied by critics. Former students from the region promoted the publication of a book and organized a retrospective of his production from 1930 to 1994, which was exhibited at the Subte Exhibition Center in 2014, 20 years after his death. In his best tapestries, the irrational prevails and his unconscious emerges: "Much effort, energy, time have been consumed in trying to free myself from the intellectual self, and I don't know if I have achieved it to the extent that I want to. Ernesto Aroztegui (prologue to the catalog of XLII the Venice Biennial) It is manifested in his series "Reality Portraits and Fantastic Portraits" where he expresses his vision of Viceroy Pedro Melo, Bishop Oscar Romero, Sigmund Freud with cancer, Golda Meir, Jorge Luis Borges, Jose Cuneo, Albert Einstein, his own self-portrait. The series of the anamorphosis, shows a hyperrealist style with deformations that come from the late Renaissance of famous figures such as Fidel Castro, Manuel Espínola Gómez, Germán Cabrera, Ernesto Sábato. In its fabrics it uses basically acrylic wool, as well as sisal thread, jute, cotton, linen, plastic. In paper, he uses greasy techniques on canvas and paper, whose themes are the result of fantasy or take photographs as a reference. He uses a hyper-technique, with reference to Coptic art, which had its splendor at the end of the fourth century. Part of his work, presented in the XLII Biennale di Venezia, is found in the book of the same name, compiled by Angel Kalenberg, published by the MEC and the National Museum of Plastic and Visual Arts, in 1986. Tributes and awards: The National Postal Administration issued, in 1999, a series of three stamps that contemplate three artistic disciplines, among which is that of the tapestry artist Ernesto Aroztegui. It was one of the themes proposed for the Uruguay in Stamps Contest and it commemorates the 5 years of his death: it has as a background a tapestry with the technique of the Gobelin and its title is "Self-Portrait". In 1983, the artist received the Fraternity Award in the Plastic Arts category, as public recognition of the merits accumulated in his career. This prize was created by B'nai B'rith del Uruguay, and is awarded on December 10 (day of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) by this institution and the Minister of Education and Culture. It grants a trip to Israel and Europe, where you can contact various representatives of cultural development and projection. He dies in Montevideo (Uruguay) on January 19, 1994.