La XXIV historia del rostro (cruza). Pintura aeropostal No. 141, 2007

Eugenio Dittborn

Eugenio Dittborn
La XXIV historia del rostro (cruza). Pintura aeropostal No. 141
2002
Painting, fabric lining, sewing and photo-screen printing on two sections of fabric and cardboard postal envelopes
210 x 280 cm
FEMSA Collection

La XXIV historia del rostro (cruza) is part of the series of airmail paintings Eugenio Dittborn began creating in 1984, during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. The artist created, folded, and sent his works by postal mail to exhibition spaces, where the work would be presented alongside the envelope in which it was sent. This idea allowed him to send paintings by passing them off as letters in a context of hyper-surveillance and political rigidity that prohibited any criticism of the system of power. Leveraging the mail, his work could travel to any city in the world. La XXIV historia del rostro (cruza) shows a series of faces that are sometimes caricatured and other times, more portrait-like, of alleged “persons of interest” in the authoritarian regime. The work experiments with notions of identity, descriptive features, and anonymity.

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