Ester Partegàs

Ester Partegàs - Polylumpious tetraflacidontics

Technique: Enamel on mylar

Artist Biography: Ester Partegàs is a Spanish artist born in Barcelona in 1972 and based in New York. She graduated from the University of Barcelona in 1995 and later from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2000.Ester Partegàs' work focuses on the exploration of everyday life and popular culture through different media such as sculpture, installation, painting and drawing. Her work is characterized by the use of ephemeral materials and found objects, often drawn from mass culture.In her works, Ester Partegàs focuses on the interaction between popular culture and personal experience, often using everyday objects to explore themes such as identity, memory and nostalgia.Ester Partegàs' work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries around the world, including the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, the Matucana 100 Cultural Center in Santiago, Chile, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey, Mexico. In addition, she has received numerous awards and recognition for her work, including a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 2008 and a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2015.

 

Polylumpious Tetraflacidontics is an extensive series of pictorial works in which Ester Partegàs reproduces commercial food labels, enlarging and deforming the image to highlight the artificiality of its ingredients. A sort of zoom that, as if it were a large magnifying glass, oversizes the textual information of these preservatives and colorants, giving the piece an optical effect that, once again, brings us back to sculpture. On the other hand, the use of textual messages -a direct reference to the slogans and marketing strategies of mass culture- also functions as one of the usual constants in his work. This tension around the excess of consumption and its wastefulness turns it into an elegant mockery, an astute denunciation and paradox at the same time. Partegàs appropriates the marketing strategies of packaging, where everything is beautiful, shiny and attractive, and gives them back to us crumpled and broken, after having been consumed and thrown away, but still attractive, like pieces of pop paintings. Such is the ironic and critical game of Ester Partegàs, who with this series constantly reminds us that we are not what we eat, but what we consume. In her own words: "My work is an attempt to rescue the everyday with all its versatility and contradictory meanings".