Ester Partegàs was born in 1972 in La Garriga, Barcelona, Spain. She has an B.F.A. degree (in sculpture) from the Universitat de Barcelona and has completed postgraduate studies at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. She participated in the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, in 1999.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Connecticut), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), 2nd Moscow Bienniale, Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, North Carolina), Walker’s Point Center for the Arts (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, Virginia), Cercle Cultural Caja Madrid (Barcelona), SculptureCenter (New York), Rice University Art Gallery (Houston, Texas), Queens Museum of Art (New York) and Whitney Museum of American Art (Altria, New York).
Ester Partegàs’ work seeks, discovers and produces questions about worth, loss and indifference in the generic objects and spaces that we consume. With a varied formal vocabulary that incorporates sculpture, photography, drawing and painting, Partegàs explores our ways of seeing and establishing relationships with our immediate material world.
Since her first exhibitions in the late nineties, Partegàs has developed a theme that explores the urban landscape of the consumer society. Through her pieces, the artist expresses her interest in the power of the word and its confrontation with the realm of the image. In this way, Partegàs focuses her work on ubiquitous objects and spaces that are part of our daily lives. Thus, residues resulting from our everyday interactions —plastic bags, food packaging, supermarket tickets…— are employed by the artist to explore a dynamic and unstable space that simultaneously enjoys and laments the engagements of contemporary culture.
