Exhibitions
Ester Partegàs and the poetics of everyday gestures
The artist from La Garriga transforms Es Baluard into a labyrinth of tensions, memory and imagination, between baskets, talaiots and everyday objects.
Ester Partegàs lands at Es Baluard with her new exhibition Arquitectura menor , a project that invites us to explore the limits between space, object and everyday perception. Until June 5, the museum offers an immersion in the artist's creative universe. Conceived jointly with the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, Arquitectura menor revisits three decades of the work of the artist from La Garriga, without following the rigidity of a retrospective narrative. Curated by Bea Espejo, the tour proposes a circular route, where the pieces dialogue with each other and generate a permeable space, capable of activating subtle connections between moments, materials and diverse meanings, inviting the visitor to get lost and find themselves again in a labyrinth of forms and ideas.
This new exhibition at Es Baluard Museu delicately approaches the idea of minor history: the smallest gestures, minimal actions, marginal traditions, small audiences or chance encounters with certain cultural materials. Each piece seems to capture fragments of life that would normally go unnoticed, turning them into silent witnesses to a world full of subtleties. With an arrangement that evokes the vastness of a large archaeological park, the exhibition seeks to recreate that space of tension that runs through all of Partegàs' work, whether through the constant play of scales or the contradictions that inhabit his materials and concepts.
This tension becomes, at the same time, a place of vital and philosophical restlessness, a territory where the artist constructs a free, pleasant and speculative space. It is a space that invites the visitor to question what we assume as real, to explore the gray areas between object and perception, and to be surprised by the unexpected connections that arise between memory, matter and idea.
Arquitectura menor explores balance, gesture and resistance, proposing a space of tensions where philosophy meets life experience. The exhibition connects with the marginal, the imaginal and the feminine, weaving subtle links between history, memory and matter.
If in her early works Ester Partegàs observed boards, containers, slogans, bins, labels, barcodes or magazine headlines, today her eye has shifted towards baskets, tombs, bridges, baths, landmarks, crypts, pockets or aqueducts, objects and spaces that, like herself, inhabit the border between the everyday and the exceptional. Each element is a door, an opportunity to activate connections between past and present, between intimate scale and monumentality, between philosophical reflection and sensitive perception.
Line II (Laundry Baskets) from 2025 is the large installation that Ester Partegàs has created expressly for the exhibition. In this work, the artist incorporates some of the most emblematic objects of Mallorcan craftsmanship, such as chairs, pots and plates, weaving them into a dialogue between tradition and contemporaneity. As in her most recent works, Partegàs reflects on the interior of the sculpture, that hidden space that remains hidden, but which, at the same time, is susceptible to being occupied, inhabited or imagined by the visitor.
Alongside the installation, two large drawings continue the trajectory begun with knead, penetrate, let go (2022-2023), increasing their scale and highlighting the relationship between body, gesture and architecture. This time, the forms seem to pay subtle homage to the talayots, the prehistoric constructions so characteristic of Menorca and Mallorca, evoking a remote past that dialogues with the artist's contemporary sensibility. The drawings, like the sculptures, offer a space where the imagination can inhabit, exploring the tensions between what is visible and what remains latent, between the monumental and the intimate, between collective memory and personal experience.
