Dario Villalba Biography

San Sebastian, 1939

Spanish painter born in San Sebastian in February 22th, 1939. Started studying Law and Philosophy in Madrid, but then he shifted to painting in 1956.

He studied for four years in the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, continuing in André Lhote´s studio in Paris in 1958 and Harvard University, Cambridge in 1963.

After working with an abstact language, he came back to figurative painting.

In 1968 he began a series of paintings entitled Figuras Encapsuladas (Encapsulated Figures) that represented human beings trapped inside plastic materials. This developed in thematic series that incorporated normal photographs and photographs altered with brush strokes, like the series of Redención (Redemption.)

His presence in the Venice Biennale in 1970 triggered his international success, that kept consolidating during the decade. Since 1972 the tragic elemments become more evident, setting painting aside to use black and white photographs along with the international tendencies - Baldesary, Boltansky- that were developing in the same direction, composing and decomposing images, but keeping an expressionist will. In the mid-seventies he came back to painting and the eighties led to a new stage of synthesis of previous experiences, integrating photography and painting, figures and abstraction.

In 1984 he´s granted with the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas.