Darío Villalba
Documento Básico B/N, 1976
Mixed media on photograph
64 x 54cm
Unique work
12995
Copyright The Artist
€ 11,500
Darío Villalba (1939–2018, San Sebastián, Spain) was a key figure in post-war Spanish art, developing a distinctive practice across photography, painting, sculpture and installation. From the mid-1960s onwards, he challenged...
Darío Villalba (1939–2018, San Sebastián, Spain) was a key figure in post-war Spanish art, developing a distinctive practice across photography, painting, sculpture and installation. From the mid-1960s onwards, he challenged conventional distinctions between photography and painting, treating the photographic image asa material that could be cropped, enlarged, repeated and transformed through painterly intervention. His work frequently focused on anonymous, isolated or marginal figures, using the human body to explore vulnerability, identity and psychological states.Executed in 1976, Documento básico B/N belongs to Villalba’s important Documentos básicos series, conceived as an evolving visual archive of photographs taken by the artist alongside images appropriated from other sources. Through cropping, enlargement and mixed-media intervention, Villalba removes the photograph from its original context and transforms it into a unique pictorial object. The series represents a central development in his exploration of the instability of photographic images and the boundary between mechanical reproduction and individual artistic gesture. Its continuing importance within Villalba’s practice was highlighted by the dedicated exhibition Documentos básicos at Galería Luis Adelantado, Valencia, in 2021.
