ESTER PARTEGÀS’ work cannily articulates tensions around consumption and excess, capturing the expression and resistance that somehow escape through fissures in a contemporary climate of scrutiny and control. In her investigations of public and private spaces, she often takes the city street, its people, products and refuse, as her starting point. She creates unnerving, gestural tableaux that consider how individuality and collectivity evolve and devolve.

Partegàs produces work across an often surprising range of media, including drawings on Mylar; digital prints on Perspex; sculptural installations in paper, cardboard, wood, fiberglass or cement; and adhesive vinyl murals. She explores excessive consumption by destabilizing scale, and mimicking and parodying familiar signs or settings. She applies an often darkly comic wit to her meditations on urban spaces and consumer lifestyles, playing with the urge to privilege the handmade over the mass-manufactured.

Partegàs suggests that with our ever more supervised and restrained personal experiences, it is in the rejected, the unclean, and the surplus that creativity, agency, and defiance may prosper. She presents a paradoxical, almost Beckettian world where the sense of a continuous present is tempered by a looming fear of apocalypse.

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ESTER PARTEGÀS (La Garriga, Barcelona, 1972) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BFA from the Universitat de Barcelona and has completed postgraduate studies in Multimedia at Hochschule der Kunste, Berlin.

Selected exhibitions include: Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY; Denison Museum, Granville, OH (both 2010); Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY; Macro Future, Depart Foundation, Rome; Foundation CaixaForum, Madrid (all 2009); The Aldrich Museum, CT (2008); Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (solo); 2nd Moscow Bienniale (both 2007); Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Walker's Point Center for the Arts, Milwaukee, WI; Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA (solo); Cercle Cultural CajaMadrid, Barcelona (solo) (all 2006); Sculpture Center, New York (2005); Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, TX (solo) (2003); Queens Museum of Art, NY (2003); Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York (2002).

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