• Eugenio Dittborn, La XXVII Historia del rostro (Lejia), 2004 (detail). Dye, poplin, stitching and photo-silkscreen on sixteen pieces of Duck fabric, 210 x 2240 cm. Courtesy of the artist. © of the work of art, Eugenio Dittborn, 2024
Eugenio Dittborn, La XXVII Historia del rostro (Lejia), 2004 (detail). Dye, poplin, stitching and photo-silkscreen on sixteen pieces of Duck fabric, 210 x 2240 cm. Courtesy of the artist. © of the work of art, Eugenio Dittborn, 2024

Eugenio Dittborn. Airmail Paintings

Location: Exhibition Hall B

Airmail paintings are a hybrid between a letter and a painting. They have both an epistolary body and a pictorial body, so to speak. Eugenio Dittborn invented this format in 1983 in Santiago, Chile, following more than a decade of experimenting on different supports with extra-pictorial techniques through which he sought to challenge traditional easel painting. At that time, Dittborn used materials such as grey cardboard, acrylic plastic, cotton, flour sacks, MDF and even the Atacama Desert as supports for his work.

Airmail paintings were designed to be folded, put in an envelope and sent via the international airmail network. They travel from one place to another on the planet in a coming and going where origin and destination are constantly shifting. All the spaces where the paintings are exhibited are places of passage. The envelopes, which are exhibited alongside the paintings, function as a sort of catalogue or logbook in which the name of the addressee, the postage stamps, the title, the technique, a descriptive or poetic text and the itinerary of each painting are included.

Letters during the journey and paintings once they reach their destination, airmail paintings exhibit the marks of the voyage on their surface. In this sense, the folds play a central role in these works. They are a key feature of this airmail-based approach that allowed Dittborn to connect with the international art world in the midst of a military dictatorship. The paintings flew in and out of Chile, slipping past the fierce cultural censorship imposed by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. In this regard, in conversation with Sean Cubitt, Dittborn explains that the political aspect of his works resides in the folds of the aeropostal paintings. “The airmail-based nature of my paintings as a strategy, material option and artistic cunning: to pass off a painting as a letter, to reach any point on the planet without fail, to overcome isolation, separation and international confinement. All this is possible through and from the folds. The journey, then, is the politics of my paintings, and the folds, the unfolding of these politics.”

On arrival at their destination, the airmail paintings are unfolded and hung to occupy a large expanse of wall. They are large-format paintings, such as the three that make up the present exhibition at Es Baluard Museu in Palma. Within each painting, between its folds, Dittborn incorporates a variable number of elements and images from a wide range of diverse origins: police files, old sports magazines, drawings by schizophrenics, comic vignettes, among others. With them he constructs a sort of counter-narrative that distances itself from official history and that can undoubtedly be read as a precursor of the decolonial practices that abound in today’s cultural scene.

The exhibition “Eugenio Dittborn’s Airmail Paintings” is the first solo show in Spain by one of the fundamental artists of Latin American conceptual art in the 1970s and 1980s. The influence of his work and visual philosophy has been crucial for several generations of artists on the continent. His artistic practice projects a profound reflection on the limits of painting, its materiality, its circulation and the ways of understanding the relations between the local and the global, the centre and the periphery, while also questioning conventional discourses on identity, origin and history.

 

Eugenio Dittborn (Santiago de Chile, 1943), was an independent studies student at the School of Fine Arts of the University of Chile between 1961 and 1965, and then continued his studies in silkscreen printing and lithography in Spain and Germany. In 1971, he returned to Chile. In 1985, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation in New York and in 2005, he was awarded the National Prize for Visual Arts by the Chilean Ministry of Culture.

His work has been exhibited internationally in a number of exhibitions in institutions and biennials such as: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2019); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2016); Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2012); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012 and 1992); Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul, Porto Alegre (2011); Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah (2009); Museo Serralves, Porto (2006); São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (2004); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2000 and 1994); Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2000); Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile (1998); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1997); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1996); Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (1993), and Documenta IX, Kassel (1992), among others.

His works are part of collections in institutions such as: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Instituto Inhotim, Belo Horizonte, and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile.

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31st January 2025 → 15th June 2025
Curator: Patrick Hamilton
Activities:
GUIDED TOURS TO THE EXHIBITION
Catalán: Saturday, April 12, 12h
Spanish: Saturday, April 26, 12h
Prior registration