ESTER PARTEGÀS. MINOR ARCHITECTURE

Curated by Bea Espejo.

Ester Partegàs’s exhibition, conceived jointly for the Museo CA2M of the Autonomous Community of Madrid and Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani in Palma de Mallorca, represents a broad survey of her work over the last three decades. Rather than a retrospective gaze, the show adopts a circular narrative that interrelates works from different periods, establishing a porous, permeable dialogue between them. The artist's maxim—that, on a creative level, she can’t keep still—serves as a metaphor for the tone pursued in this exhibition: an itinerary filled with gestures and balancing acts, of equilibriums and resistances, of turns and leaps, of toing and froing.

At the same time, the show takes a close look at the notion of minor history, small gestures, minimal actions, spurious traditions, limited audiences and chance encounters with certain cultural materials. With a layout that largely resembles a great archaeological park, the exhibition seeks to generate a space for the same tension that is found in her works, whether because of the interplay of different scales or the intrinsic contradictions in her practice. That tension also reflects the space where the artist’s existential and philosophical preoccupations unfold. A free, pleasant and speculative space that allows her to question the things we assume to be real.

Minor Architecture therefore places the emphasis on the vernacular, pedigreeless architecture that is produced through spontaneous activity, on the art of building as universal phenomenon, which represents a statement for the artist and ties in with the marginal, the imaginal and the feminine. In her early works, Ester Partegàs focused her gaze on boards, containers, slogans, wastepaper bins, labels, barcodes and magazine headlines; today her gaze falls on laundry baskets, tombs, bridges, thermal baths, milestones, crypts, pockets and aqueducts. Like animal architecture, her constructions today are inward-looking, part hiding place/part shelter, embracing all those gestures of the body that have never been valued or that do not have a worthy architectural tradition.

The show is completed by a publication that invites audiences to explore the artist’s career and the singularity of her output over the past three decades. Texts by Martin Herbert, Pilar Bonet and Michael Taussig join the curator’s essay in this analysis.

ESTER PARTEGÀS

Ester Partegàs (La Garriga, Barcelona, ​​1972) has exhibited her work extensively both in Spain and abroad. Her most recent shows have been held at venues including CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA (2025); Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2024); TEA Tenerife (2023); Palazzo Esposizioni, Roma (2023); Nogueras Blanchard, Madrid (2022); Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2021); Essex Flowers, New York (2021); Pure Joy, Marfa, Texas (2020); Conde Duque, Madrid (2020); The Drawing Center, New York (2019); Museum of the City of New York (2019); Bienal Transfronteriza, El Paso Museum of Art + Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez (2018); Whitechapel Gallery, London; Museo MACRO/Depart Foundation, Rome; and at biennials such as those of Moscow, Busan and Athens.

She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2025), the Rome Prize in Visual Arts 2022–2023 of the American Academy in Rome, the Sixth Catalina d’Anglade Award - ARCOmadrid (2023), the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Grant (2014), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2004), the Fundación Botín Grant (1999) and other awards. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation, MacDowell and Open Sessions of the Drawing Center, New York. She has taught at the Yale School of Art, Skowhegan, Virginia Commonwealth University and SUNY Purchase, and since 2016 she has been a teacher at the Parsons School of Design, New York.

Since 1997 she has lived and worked in New York, and she has studios in Marfa, Texas and Barcelona.

BEA ESPEJO

Bea Espejo (Vilanova i la Geltrú, Barcelona, 1977) is a curator, art critic and educator. She regularly writes articles for Babelia, the cultural supplement of El País, for which she was the art editor from 2017 to 2022. Prior to that, from 2008 she contributed articles to El Cultural of El Mundo, and her essays have appeared in numerous publications and artist catalogues. As an educator she teaches at Nebrija University and Escuela SUR, and she directs the Research Methodologies module on the master’s degree in Curating at Pamplona University. She is also the visual arts adviser for the “Internationalisation of Spanish Culture Programme” of Acción Cultural Española at the Ministry of Culture.

She has most recently curated the following exhibitions: Todos los conciertos, todas las noches, todo vacío, by Ana Laura Aláez for the CA2M/Azkuna Zentroa; Los blancos secretos, at Ciudad de la Cultura in Santiago de Compostela; La danza mudanza, by Fuentesal Arenillas at the CAAC in Seville; and dime quién eres Yo, by Luis Gordillo, at the Sala Alcalá 31 of the Autonomous Community of Madrid. In 2022 she was the curator of the Spanish Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, featuring the artist Ignasi Aballí and the project Corrección. Distinctions for her work include the GAC 2017 award for art criticism.

She lives and works in Madrid.

Coproduced with: