NYAB Event - Dario Escobar "Play Offs"

Dario Escobar "Play Offs"

Josee Bienvenu Gallery

This event has ended.

Josée Bienvenu gallery presents Play Offs, Dario Escobar's first solo exhibition in New York. As gas prices go up on a daily basis, the best remedy is to do more sports: walking, skateboarding, playing tennis, baseball, ping-pong. Play Offs is an invitation to deconstruct depression by approaching the most common objects with a radical subjectivity.

Dario Escobar's work is characterized by the use of materials charged with historic and symbolic meaning, articulated in a language that reference minimalism as well as pop art. He started by using elements from his immediate context: his first object interventions were on icons of Guatemalan colonialism's legacy. Altered and modified religious imagery, use of traditional Baroque colonial techniques such as gold leaf and silver repoussé are some of the trans-contextualizing methods he has developed over the past ten years.

In Play Offs, the artist pursues his ongoing investigation of the semiotics of the object in the arena of sports. Confiscated, manipulated and reconfigured, sport objects stop being part of identifiable structures to become symbols that question the dynamics of power and challenge notions such as competition, success and failure, virility, social status, and national pride.