Painter Eugenio Dittborn will discuss the process of his painting Feb. 26 at 7:30 p.m. at the University of Colorado at Boulder in Sibell Wolle Fine Arts Building room N141.
The presentation is titled "The 16th History of the Human Face (to Besiege)" and is free and open to the public. Dittborn's talk is part of the Fine Arts department's Visiting Artist Program.
In his painting, Dittborn focuses on time, place and distance. He creates provocative images involving race, political oppression and self-identity that question humanity. Probably the most intriguing aspect of Dittborn's work is that he sends his art around the world in airplanes.
The works, also known as "Airmail Paintings," are mailed from Santiago, Chile, in the freight compartments of planes to various destinations around the world. On the journey to their final destinations, the paintings gain scars and are altered in a way that is out of the artist's control. They then are displayed in galleries, changed by their travel.
Through the act of mailing his work, Dittborn believes he delegates control over his paintings to chance and allows each work to have a history of its own, independent of his touch.
Dittborn creates his paintings using a wide array of inexpensive materials like photocopied images and text from a variety of sources that are sewed onto clothes-lining fabric. He is particularly interested in the concepts of distance, space and permanence.
Dittborn was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1943 and continues his work there today. Since 1984 he has exhibited his work internationally in galleries including the Reina Sofia in Madrid, P.S. 1 in New York and the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston in Texas.