Ester Partegàs

Ester Partegàs - knead, penetrate, let go (ToDo)

Technique: Graphite and stickers on tracing paper

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.

 

It is that architectural desire of Partegàs to shape everyday space in a profound way that gives rise to the new series of drawings entitled knead, penetrate, let go [knead, penetrate, lose] (2022), produced in Rome, during his residency at the American Academy. "I want to relate bread to stone as an essential building block, as an architecture that builds life: one is permanent, the other impermanent, and becomes us.". On vegetal paper, charcoal stains are articulated to form the pores of a piece of bread, which in turn is stacked playfully on other pieces of bread that exhibit their spongy entrails, seductive, almost inviting us to take refuge in them. The tenuous and delicate paper is supported by childish stickers, those mundane and seemingly unimportant, domestic little things that speak of care and the little things of everyday life. The vulnerable, at times, can be the most important foundation.