Introduction
Guatemalan artist Darío Escobar (b. 1971) lives and works between Mexico and Guatemala City. He works in various media: sculpture, installation, painting, and drawing. His work often makes use of the concept of the readymade, but the objects Escobar chooses are always altered in some way or another. Through the alterations as well as the placement in an artistic context the objects gain new meanings. General themes in Escobar’s work are the complex relations between globalization, aesthetics, colonialism, modernism and consumerism. The structural power relations between these concepts are investigated through attention to both materials and space as well as the different connotations connected with the chosen objects.
Sports have been a recurring theme in Darío Escobar’s work in recent years. For Escobar the sporting equipment is used as tools to describe globalism. It becomes a sign of multinational brands and movement that have swept across cultures and countries.