Ester Partegàs: Serial Cereal

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce Ester Partegàs: Serial Cereal. On view from November 7 through December 19 at 25 Greene Street in SoHo, the exhibition is the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery and her first solo show in New York since 2015. Following the artist’s major mid-career survey at Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo in Madrid and at Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma, the exhibition will feature a selection of recent graphite drawings and new large-scale sculptures.

For nearly three decades, Partegàs has made work that examines the mundane, overlooked, and mass-produced, using techniques of fragmentation and enlargement to defamiliarize the “infra-ordinary” objects that populate our built environments. Her pencil drawings, monumental sculptures, and installations are at once playful explorations of color, scale, and form and profoundly philosophical meditations on the relationships between the common world of objects and larger social systems. Together, Partegàs’s artworks pose a sequence of questions: How do we inhabit space? What do we build when we build? What invisible forces structure our lives, physically, emotionally, and ideologically?

In Serial Cereal, the artist presents a selection of Minor Architecture drawings, including the sixteen-foot-long, four-panel Minor Architecture (VI). Inspired by Bronze-age megaliths such as the Balearic Island talayots or Sardinian nuraghes, these works depict slices of bread arranged into menhirs, dolmens, and other prehistoric architectural configurations. Evoking domestic intimacy and vast timescales, Partegàs makes a pointed argument about the gendered hierarchies of objects, suggesting that bread—that soft, feminized foodstuff—is as foundational to civilization as stone. Additions of children’s stickers and colored tape, which hold together individual sheets of paper, further emphasize the strength and resilience of the seemingly “minor.”

The sculptures in Serial Cereal bring monumental weight to a different set of overlooked items: dish racks and laundry baskets. In the artist’s hands, these quotidian, mass-produced objects—rendered at grand scale in papier-mâché, plywood, fabric, and gypsum—become a meditation on domesticity and control. Repetitive bars and geometric lattices suggest an architecture of boundaries, entrapment, and subjection, while the hulking forms, particularly in the floor sculptures, are overpowering, almost domineering. Such associations are nevertheless paired with a palpable sense of fragility. Nestled within these ad-hoc architectures are found or cast objects: kitchen towels, bricks, cereal boxes, trouser pockets, vegetables, books. These objects, rescued from almost-invisible daily routines, highlight the small actions, gestures, and vernacular rituals through which we hold and build life.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Ester Partegàs.