Biography
Ester Partegàs is a Catalan-born, New York–based sculptor. For nearly three decades, the artist has devoted herself to investigating the overlooked, “infra-ordinary” objects and commodities that populate the environments of global capitalism. Using a range of media and techniques, Partegàs creates replicas of everyday items like plastic shopping bags, potted plants, and fast food, then subjects these objects to various transformations—shifting their scale, smoothing out their edges into polygonal forms, or reconfiguring their volumes as precarious architectural fragments. Through acts of defamiliarization, Partegàs sheds light on the invisible substrates of contemporary life, inviting us to see anew the hidden ideological forces and philosophical undercurrents that shape our world.
Born in La Garriga, Barcelona, Partegàs enrolled in Hochschule der Künste in Berlin before relocating to New York City in 1999. A key figure in the Williamsburg scene of the early 2000s, the artist at this time immersed herself in the writings of Michel de Certeau, whose essays on agency, power, and public space had a profound influence on her. Some of Partegàs’s earliest major artworks were room-scale environments: airport lounges, waiting rooms, and corporate atriums that she meticulously reproduced with matte board, creating eerily dreamlike sites of transit and dislocation. At around this time, she also created paper flyers with cryptic verse, affixing them to electric poles and shop windows. Through these guerilla interventions, she allowed for unexpected, poetic encounters in public space.
More recently, Partegàs has turned her focus toward the domestic. A leitmotif for this new phase is the plastic laundry basket—an object as ubiquitous as it is mundane. Working in papier-mâché, fabric, and wood, Partegàs remakes fragments of this household item in a range of scales and configurations, adorning it with found objects, wrapping it around furniture, and painting it unexpected colors. Utterly unremarkable in its blandness, the laundry basket—a “black hole of the everyday,” as the artist calls it—reveals a multitude of contradictory associations and functions. It is simultaneously an avatar of female body and domestic labor, a space of comfort and confinement, and an uncanny “minor architecture” that is at once familiar, threatening, and strange.
Solo exhibitions of Partegàs’s work have been held at Rice University Art Gallery (2002, Houston); Hallwalls (2003, Buffalo, NY); Virginia Commonwealth University (2006, Richmond); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (2007, Madrid); NoguerasBlanchard (2004, 2007, 2009, 2017, 2022, Madrid/Barcelona); Foxy Production (2006, 2010, 2015, New York); and Christopher Grimes Gallery (2006, 2007, 2010, Santa Monica). Recently, STEADY, a two-person exhibition with Michelle Lopez, opened at Ballroom Marfa (2024) and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art (2025, San Francisco). In January 2026, a major mid-career survey of Partegàs’s work will open at Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Móstoles and Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma, Mallorca.
Ester Partegàs’s work is featured in the collections of many museums, including: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museu de Granollers, Spain; La Panera, Centre d’Art Contemporani, Lleida, Spain; Museo Patio Herreriano de Arte Contemporáneo Español, Valladolid; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Helga de Alvear, Cáceres, Spain. Additionally, she is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2005), the Rome Prize Fellowship (2022–23), and the Guggenheim Fellowship (2025).
