Published to accompany the exhibition Ester Partegàs. Minor Architecture, this publication offers a closer look at the artist’s career and the distinctive body of work she has developed over the past three decades. Texts by Martin Herbert, Pilar Bonet and Michael Taussig, alongside an essay by the curator, offer further perspectives on her practice.
Since emerging on the art scene in the 1990s, Ester Partegàs has focused on everyday life and consumer culture, developing a distinctive way of looking at ordinary objects, including their more pop dimensions. Through her eyes, even a bar receipt can become an artistic expression that speaks to who we are and where we are going. Partegàs turns her attention to the everyday and the seemingly minor as a way of reflecting on the world around us and how we relate to it.
Her creative process draws, for instance, on meticulous drawings embellished with children’s stickers, championing the value of making things by hand and of looking closely enough to see things differently. Partegàs moves away from ornate, baroque visual languages to foreground the spaces we pass through: gardens, streets and benches in cities such as New York. In doing so, she affirms the journey itself as a metaphor for life, always poised between the precarious and the stable, the real and the imagined, the past and the present.
Published by Museo CA2M, Es Baluard Museu and This Side Up.