Aitor Lajarin is an interdisciplinary artist and organizer from the Basque country of Spain, currently living and working in Fort Collins, Colorado, United States. He is a painter. He uses cartoonist imagery to depict imaginary scenes in which he invites the viewer to reflect with perplexity on the most absurd or paradoxical aspects of human and non-human existence or the society we suffer and observe every day. His paintings are also a playful celebration of the medium of painting and its physical and sensorial presence. Aitor decided to invite other artists and curators to organize exhibitions in, on, and for his paintings.

This series, which he calls “collaborative paintings,” consists of small-scale exhibitions hosted in his paintings, in the figurative visual spaces depicted on his paintings, and on their flat material surfaces.

During his time at GlogauAIR, Aitor has worked on organizing two more collaborative paintings. “Sydinkat” is a painting that he painted, evoking loosely a memory of a bar he spent a day in with his friend Isma in Neukölln Berlin in 2019. He painted the piece in Fort Collins and shipped the piece to Berlin recently. Some of the other artists in residence have freely created art or artistic interventions for its surface. The collaborating artists had full control, and Aitor really didn’t know until the interventions were done what the result would be.

Participating artists:

Aitor Lajarin Encina, Carlos Asensio, Sofia Bevione, Savanna Fortgang, Sergei Kurek, Elizabeth Littlejohn, Laura Olea Lopez, Julia Rigby, Mason Weiss