Background
Darío Escobar was born in 1971, in Guatemala City, Guatemala.
Rafael Landívar University, Guatemala City 01016, Guatemala
Escobar graduated from Rafael Landívar University.
Rafael Landívar University, Guatemala City 01016, Guatemala
Escobar graduated from Rafael Landívar University.
Darío Escobar was born in 1971, in Guatemala City, Guatemala.
Escobar graduated from Rafael Landívar University. He also studied Visual Arts at the National School of Plastic Arts "Rafael Rodríguez Padilla" in Guatemala City.
Since the late 1990's, Escobar has mobilized armies of everyday industrial and consumer products, such as McDonald’s cups, cereal boxes, vulcanized rubber, car bumpers and sports equipment of various types, in order to construct an ongoing dialogue with the reality of global consumerism.
Darío took part in numerous solo exhibitions, including "Dario Escobar: Selección", II National Biennial of Lima, Peru (2000); "Dario Escobar, Trabajo reciente", Galería Jocobo Karpio, San José, Costa Rica (2001); "Visual Entertainments", Museo de Arte Moderno de Mérida, Mérida, Mexico (2003); "Out!", Galería Jacobo Karpio, Miami, Florida (2004); "Serpentario", (CCEG) Centro Cultural de España Guatemala, Guatemala City, Guatemala (2005); "Objetos en Transito", Sala Gasco, Santiago, Chile (2006); "Dario Escobar/Project room", Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, New York City (2007); "Playoffs", Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York City (2008); "Anverso y Reverso", González y González, Santiago, Chile (2010); "Dario Escobar / trabajo reciente", Baró Galeria, São Paulo, Brazil (2012); "Dario Escobar / Línea & Espacio", ArteCentro, Guatemala City, Guatemala (2013); "Broken circle", CAFAM Museum, Los Angeles, California (2014); "En otro orden", the 9.99 gallery, Guatemala City, Guatemala (2015); "Dario Escobar: Composições", Casa Triângulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2016); "Lines of Flight / Dario Escobar", Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York City (2018) and others.
Selected group exhibitions he participated in include "La Joven Estampa", Casa de las Américas, Havana, Cuba (1997); VI International Art Biennale of Cuenca, Cuenca, Ecuador (1998); "L’ art dans le monde", Pont Alexandre III, Paris, France (2000); "Continuous Connection", Felissimo Project, New York City (2001); "Zones in Tension", de GANG Gallery, Harlem, the Netherlands (2002); "TransEAT", Food Culture Museum, Miami, Florida (2003); "Newspapers", Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York City (2004); "Silence & Echo", Arena 1, Santa Monica, California (2007); "Elefante negro", Museo Diego Rivera, Mexico City, Mexico (2008); "Optimismo Radical", Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York City (2010); "GAME ON!", Children's Museum of the Arts, New York City (2016) and many others.
Currently, the artist lives and works in Guatemala City.
Darío Escobar is an outstanding contemporary conceptual artist, who gained prominence for his work, that is characterized by the investigation of formal and conceptual aspects of objects and their function in visual arts. He famously uses common and mass-produced materials in conjunction with traditional Guatemalan artisanal techniques and mythological references.
Escobar first gained recognition for his clever appropriation of everyday objects, gilded in the manner of the Guatemalan baroque. He has since distinguished himself as an artist not only through this shrewd conflation of high and low-brow culture, but, most critically, through his relentless artistic investigation of what it means, as a Guatemalan, to be "contemporary".
His works are kept in the collections of different museums, including the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, Florida; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona; Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles, and others.
Darío's work often combines the present and the past in interesting confrontations. Escobar looks for ways to show how the artistic experience of Guatemala’s history and its religious symbols are related to or overlap with the visual culture of today. Skateboards, ping-pong rackets and baseball bats are covered with silver to look like religious reliquaries. Rubber bicycle tires snake across long spaces, referencing a pre-Hispanic mythological creature. Soccer balls are a frequent material in his body of work - a familiar object altered. These conglomerations, repurposed and reconfigured, make people look at mass produced objects anew.
Escobar says, that he is inspired by the way, that objects, like soccer balls, are collected and displayed in an attempt to make them more appealing to consumers. He also says, that his manipulation of the objects is a way to "change the angle of view" and gain a new perspective. At larger retailers, balls are displayed at or below eye-level in individual packaging, that elevate the intrigue of the product, while Escobar’s sculptures place them high above the viewer and bunch them together so that each ball is like the last.
