Pablo Echaurren was born on January 22, 1951, in Rome. He is the son of the Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Sebastián Matta and Angela Faranda, an Italian actress. Echaurren began painting at the age of 18 under the guidance of the Milanese gallery owner Arturo Schwarz, an early proponent of dada, surrealism, and the postwar avant-garde, whose keen instincts, landmark shows, and exhibition catalogs remain legendary for their influence on the arts in Italy over the crucial decades of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. Echaurren’s early works in enamel on cardboard often depict grids of small, illustrative images of the inorganic elements of nature; in these works, the artist creates a kind of index of knowledge, but a knowledge that is linked with feeling and experience. In the 1970s, Echaurren frequented salons of Marxist artists and intellectuals, blending art and political dissent in covers he designed for several books published by Savelli, most notably Nanni Balestrini's novel La Violenza illustrata (1976), but also the notorious Porci con le ali ("Pigs with Wings"), a scandalous "sexual/political diary of two adolescents" published the same year by Marco Lombardo Radice and Lidia Ravera. Increasingly alienated by the pretentiousness, commercialism, and doctrinaire ideology he perceived even in circles of the autonomist, extraparliamentary left, Echaurren spurned orthodox notions of both art and politics, immersing himself in currents of countercultural revolt that had swelled among disillusioned young Italians from a variety of backgrounds since the late 1960s and culminated a wave of anti-authoritarian protests that swept across the country in 1977.

Collectively labeled the Movimento del '77, this rebellion drew energy from a bewildering diversity of movements and causes, ranging from hippies, women's liberationists, pacifists, environmentalists, and gay rights activists to militant leftists, anarchists, and even terrorists. Echaurren took a stand with those who opposed violence, authoritarianism, and dogmas on all sides. Inspired by the likes of Raoul Vaneigem, Gilles Deleuzes, Felix Guattari, as well as the precedents set by Dada and the revolutionary nonsense poetry and anti-art of Vladimir Mayakovsky, he combined a radical critique of the language of authority with an impulse to turn Rome's streets and squares into a canvas for the expression of a diversity of untamed desires. Mocking the jingoistic slogans that inspired demonstrations of mindless conformity on the left as well as the right, Echaurren played a major role in street actions, occupations, festivals, and events that injected a provocative yet playful aesthetic dimension to protests, seeking to challenge the norms and conventions of Italian society while at the same time dismantling barriers between "serious" art and the practice of everday life. Starting work  as an illustrator for the radical leftist paper Lotta Continua just as things were heating up in the spring of 1977, Echaurren joined a much more unruly group of dissidents and outsiders, the Indiani Metropolitani, who painted their faces as well as the walls of the occupied University of Rome, chanting nonsense slogans and chasing away leaders of organized labor when they tried to channel the unrest into marches to the beat of tried-and-true slogans . In May, the group occupied an apartment building just off the Piazza Navona, the so-called Casa del Desiderio, which functioned as a kind of hub for the movement until police forced them to vacate the site in December 1977. Retrieved from walls and doorways in the final moments, a thick stack of scribbled notes, drawings, poems, and messages contained in the Echaurren Papers documents everyday life at the Casa del Desiderio in exquisite detail.

Together with Maurizio Gabbianelli (alias "Fanale"), who had invited him to join the Indiani Metropolitani, Echaurren founded a series of self-made underground magazines over the course of several months at the height of the Movimento del '77. These include: OASK?! (which took its name from a nonsensical word fragment scrawled on a chalkboard in the occupied university); Abat/jour; Wam (Rome's answer to Wow!, Dario Fiori's magnificent mouthpiece of Milanese "Maodada"), Materiali, and Altrove. Eschewing standard editorial practices, layouts, and even straight lines of printed text,  OASK! took a Do-It-Yourself approach that invited participation from everyone involved, the results resembling the spontaneous configuration of scribbled messages on a blackboard, and--like many other underground newspapers of the movement--deployed collage, montage, and detournement to produce striking, at times hilarious, results. Gabianelli and Echaurren collaborated on numerous hoaxes, including bogus calls for meaningless protests and, most notably, the "Zurich Conspiracy," a flier purportedly seeking to rally support for the Cabaret Voltaire (a famous Dada venue of the First World War), which had allegedly just been stormed by police and its members arrested. Italian Futurism also became an important source of inspiration, and it was at this time that Echaurren first began assembling what is now the largest collection of Italian Futurist books, magazines, and ephemera in private hands (his other passion is collecting bass guitars as an art form).

In the summer of 1977 Echaurren began a lifelong relationship with Claudia Salaris. The two soon married and together they have written several important books on the Movimento del '77 and Italian Counterculture while continuing to build their collections. Compiled, edited, and written by Salaris, the first volume of a massive bibliography of Italian Futurism based out of their collection was published in 2013. In the 1980s and 1990s, Echaurren turned to the art of the comic strip, contributing to magazines such as Frigidaire, Linus, Tango, Comic Art, and Alter Alter and publishing two graphic novels, Caffeina d'Europa, about the founder of Italian Futurism, F.T. Marinetti, and Majakovskij, about the Russian Constructivist and street artist who inspired so much of the creative critical engagement of young Italians in 1977. He also penned several books on wine, food, and rebellion with the Italian gastronome, wine critic, and intellectual Luigi Veronelli. Returning to painting in more recent years, he also writes columns on art and the art market for the Huffington Post Italy. Echaurren and Salaris live and work in Rome.