Darío Escobar

DarÍo Escobar
UNIONS AND INTERSECTIONS

November 1 – December 20, 2014
Ny Carlsberg Vej 68, Copenhagen

Nils Stærk is pleased to present Guatemalan artist Darío Escobar’s (b. 1971) first solo exhibition in Scandinavia. The exhibition will consist of new and recent sculptural works.

The title of the exhibition Unions and Intersections underlines a general theme in Escobar’s work. The chosen objects, which make up Escobar’s sculptures become markers and signs of both unions and intersections through the way they are arranged and their conversion into art.

Most of the works presented in the exhibition are sculptures made partially or entirely out of sporting goods such as footballs, basketballs, or billiard cues. Sports have been a recurring theme in Escobar’s work in recent years. However, one is not looking at the work of a sports-obsessed artist; someone who cannot get enough of the life-affirming thrills sports can offer. For Escobar these sporting effects are, to a much larger degree, signs of multinational brands and movements, which in the last decades have swept across the world and made any distinction between the local and the global impossible.

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To Escobar sports and the culture that surrounds it is inseparable from a worldwide consumerism that offers itself as a ticket to an international community if one is prepared to pay the price. By using effects from this culture Escobar calls attention to this particular situation, though without pointing fingers at sports fans. His work is also not to be understood as a sarcastic comment on the global art world or art market because of its ability to absorb such commercial elements. The works are a sincere investigation of complex power structures, including the relationship between art and consumerism.

Darío Escobar lives and works in Guatemala City. He has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions, among them, Gold, Bass Museum of Art, Miami, and Fútbol: The Beautiful Game, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (all 2014); Confusion in the Vault, Museo Jumex, México D.F. (2013); 2013 California-Pacific Triennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; Darío Escobar/La experiencia del objeto, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Santiago, Santiago, Chile, Singular/Plural, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia, and The Island: A Game of Life, Gallery One, Manarat al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (all 2012); Los impolíticos, Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, Naples, Italy, Périfériks, Centre d’art Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and Mundus Novus, 53 Biennale di Venezia, Venice (all 2009); and Poetics of the Handmade, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007). Escobar’s monograph A Singular Plurality: The Works of Darío Escobar was published by Harvard University Press in 2013.
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Works
Artist Biography
Photo: Arenovski

Darío Escobar

Born in Guatemala City, GT, 1971
Lives and works in Guatemala City, GT and Mexico City, MX

Darío Escobar’s practice is a formal and conceptual exploration of commonplace objects and their insertion into the fields of visual arts and art history. Meant to ignite a reflection in the viewer, to reconsider key relations in contemporary life, such as our bonds to mass culture, the elaboration of identity-based consumption, and the distinction between high and low culture. Escobar has since the early 90’s used ready-mades; a wide array of industrial and everyday consumption objects that range from McDonald’s paper cups to vulcanized tires and several types of sports gear to reflect upon our place within the social, political, and economic systems that sustain our existence.

Escobar was in 2020 awarded the "Carlos Mérida”, the highest artistic distinction in Guatemala by the Ministry of Culture of Guatemala. In 2022 Escobar presented a solo exhibition at the Nacional de Arte MUNAL in Mexico City, where his works was placed in the museum’s permanent exhibition, thus engaging and bringing a new perspective to their collection, in celebration of its 40^th anniversary. The show, titled La palabra es de plata, el silencio de oro, was accompanied by a richly illustrated catalog of the same name. His work has also been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at MAC – Museo de arte Contemporáneo de Santiago, Santiago de Chile; SCAD – Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno Carlos Mérida, Guatemala City; CCM – Centro Cultural Metropolitano, Guatemala City; CCEG – Centro Cultural de España Guatemala, Guatemala City; and MADC – Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, San José.

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