Darío Corbeira has been a leading member of Spain's conceptual art scene since the 1970s. He studied Technical Architecture and Sociology in Madrid and began his career as an artist as part of a group called La Familia Lavapiés, which was linked to the anti-Franco actions of the FRAP ('Revolutionary Anti-Francoist Patriotic Front') and the UPA ('Popular Union of Artists'). There, he developed a style of conceptual art with militant political content. Without abandoning these ideas, in the immediate post-Franco period (1977-1982) he began to explore painting as a materialistic practice, with elements drawn from informalism and based on the idea of the 'death' of painting: works with tenuous tonal textures and geometrical shapes surrounding or balanced against backgrounds that tend to drift towards the monochromatic. In the 1980s he returned to a more conceptual style, with installations in which he combined various materials and techniques such as photography, everyday objects, text documents and light to reflect on the problems of historical thought, cultural policies, criticism of institutions and the spaces in which they develop, globalisation, damage to the environment, sickness as an indeterminate, intermediate territory between order and chance, chaos and the accidental, all structured through sequences of prime numbers and elementary mathematical calculations. History, intermediate territories, time and death were the areas in which he work took place in the following decades.
His first exhibitions were staged in 1988 at the Juana Mordó and Helga de Alvear galleries in Madrid, and he continued to work with both until the late 1990s. In 2016 and 2017 his project Stay Silent or Lie was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León (León) and the Tabacalera gallery (Madrid). He lectured at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Salamanca from 1992 to 2013, and combines his work as an artist with the publication of critical essays, the best known of which is ¿Construir... o deconstruir? ['Construct... or Deconstruct?'] published by Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca (2000), which is dedicated to Gordon Matta-Clark. He also curates exhibitions and is the driving force behind the Brumaria platform, a project that focuses on critical studies of the links between art, aesthetics and politics, with which he took part in Documenta 12 (Kassel, Germany, 2007) and Manifesta 8 (Murcia, 2010), among other events.
Darío Corbeira has been a leading member of Spain's conceptual art scene since the 1970s. He studied Technical Architecture and Sociology in Madrid and began his career as an artist as part of a group called La Familia Lavapiés, which was linked to the anti-Franco actions of the FRAP ('Revolutionary Anti-Francoist Patriotic Front') and the UPA ('Popular Union of Artists'). There, he developed a style of conceptual art with militant political content. Without abandoning these ideas, in the immediate post-Franco period (1977-1982) he began to explore painting as a materialistic practice, with elements drawn from informalism and based on the idea of the 'death' of painting: works with tenuous tonal textures and geometrical shapes surrounding or balanced against backgrounds that tend to drift towards the monochromatic. In the 1980s he returned to a more conceptual style, with installations in which he combined various materials and techniques such as photography, everyday objects, text documents and light to reflect on the problems of historical thought, cultural policies, criticism of institutions and the spaces in which they develop, globalisation, damage to the environment, sickness as an indeterminate, intermediate territory between order and chance, chaos and the accidental, all structured through sequences of prime numbers and elementary mathematical calculations. History, intermediate territories, time and death were the areas in which he work took place in the following decades.
His first exhibitions were staged in 1988 at the Juana Mordó and Helga de Alvear galleries in Madrid, and he continued to work with both until the late 1990s. In 2016 and 2017 his project Stay Silent or Lie was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León (León) and the Tabacalera gallery (Madrid). He lectured at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Salamanca from 1992 to 2013, and combines his work as an artist with the publication of critical essays, the best known of which is ¿Construir... o deconstruir? ['Construct... or Deconstruct?'] published by Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca (2000), which is dedicated to Gordon Matta-Clark. He also curates exhibitions and is the driving force behind the Brumaria platform, a project that focuses on critical studies of the links between art, aesthetics and politics, with which he took part in Documenta 12 (Kassel, Germany, 2007) and Manifesta 8 (Murcia, 2010), among other events.