Maxín Picallo

Maxín Xulio Picallo Durán was born in 1940 in Santo Ildefonso, in the parish of Santa María de Troáns in Cuntis, Pontevedra. He grew up in a humble farming household with his parents and three siblings, splitting school with livestock work. While waiting with the animals he carved flutes and figures from pine bark with a pocket knife. A teacher, Xosé (José) Losada, noticed the boy's drawings and wood carving and urged the family toward formal training. Neighbours tried to persuade his father to send him to the School of Arts; money was tight, and Maxín spent a year as a mason before moving, at about fifteen, to Santiago de Compostela in 1956.

In Compostela he entered the Escuela de Artes y Oficios (today the Escuela de Arte y Superior de Diseño Maestro Mateo). There he studied with Francisco Asorey, Felipe Criado, and Fernando Barral. Asorey taught him to work granite; Barral taught marble. Later obituaries remembered him as one of the last living pupils of Asorey, a central figure of modern Galician sculpture. After studies and military service in Vigo, where he met sculptor Xoán Piñeiro Nogueira of Goián, Picallo settled in Goián (Tomiño) to work in Piñeiro's workshop. In that Miño-border town he met Delva Asensio, whom he married. They had three children, Delva, Maxín, and Cecilia; granddaughters Lea and Daría later came from the younger generation. In Goián he shared conversation with painters Antonio Fernández and Xavier Pousa, sculptor Xosé Antúnez Pousa, writer Eliseo Alonso, and others from both sides of the Portuguese border.

From the late 1960s he exhibited widely in Galicia and beyond, including the Ateneo de Pontevedra (1968) and repeated shows in Vigo, Lugo, Alcoy, Benidorm, Cuntis, A Guarda, and Tomiño. His early public works include the Nereids fountain in O Rosal (1967), Domitila for the Museo Provincial de Lugo (1968), A Familia in Tui (1970), and the Monument to the Miño at Fonmiñá / A Pastoriza (inaugurated 1971). In A Guarda he carved the monument to poet Feliciano Rolán (1972) and a bust of architect Antonio Palacios for O Porriño. An unfinished horse fountain for the Monastery of Oia occupied him in the mid-1970s and later earned him the IV Recoñecemento Mosteiro de Oia (2022).

In 1978 he took on restoration of the Plateresque church façade in Biar (Alicante) and lived for years in the Valencian Community, producing southern commissions such as the Monument als Geladors Artesans in Ibi (around 1990-1991) and works in Benidorm, Elche, and Náquera. Galicia remained his spiritual centre. In Moaña he raised the monument to the emigrating sailor (1988). In Baiona, on 2 March 1993, then Prince Felipe inaugurated Encontro entre dous mundos (Encounter between two worlds), Picallo's granite ensemble marking the fifth centenary of the caravel Pinta's return with news of America; Manuel Fraga and ambassadors from the Americas attended. Later came the monument to poet Manuel Cabada Vázquez in A Estrada, A Esperanza do Regreso do Emigrante in Beariz (2001, with his son, signed "Os Picallos"), the Canteiros group in Cuntis (1998), the farm woman in Forcarei (2003), the missing sailor at A Guarda harbour (c. 2002-2003), and Breogán (Celtic chieftain) on the climb to Castro de Santa Trega (finished 2004, placed 2007). Pieces entered collections in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile (one Hispanic Culture Institute work was reported lost after the Pinochet coup), France, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Russia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

In his San Roque studio in Goián he kept carving stone and modelling clay, drew elongated figures in homage to El Greco, and late in life took up oil and acrylic painting, photography software, and writing. In 2022 he published De Roncesvalles a Santiago de Compostela: un escultor en el camino, a pilgrim's diary of landscape and companionship. In summer 2026 his autobiography Picallo Escultor: autobiografía de Maxín Xulio Picallo Durán appeared (over four hundred pages), with a prologue by Felipe-Senén López of the Real Academia de Belas Artes and an epilogue by Ángeles Tilve Jar, director of the Museo Provincial de Pontevedra. He died on 28 September 2026, aged 86. A farewell was held on 30 September 2026 at 17:00 in the parish church of Goián, Tomiño. Regional media called him one of Galicia's finest figurative sculptors: a master of the pointer and mallet whose stone remembered women, sailors, canteiros, and people far from home.