Untitled Performances

The second edition of the series The Chairs of Tàpies is fortunate to feature Esther Ferrer, a pioneering figure in action art who has made her body an essential tool for resistance, expression and thought. Ferrer sees the body not just as matter, but as a symbolic medium for experiences, memories and conflicts. Her practice works with the persistence of gesture, the construction of time by repetition and the ability of the body to store and transmit, almost like a written skin, the tensions between the I and the world.

On the basis of silence, humour and radicalism, from a coherent, free positioning, she confronts convention, offering a distinctive view of how bodies resist and explain, becoming sensitive archives of identity, absence and presence. Within this framework, Ferrer will therefore be inviting us to celebrate gesture as living memory, as a place from which the body appeals, questions and transforms itself.

Esther Ferrer has been staging actions since the mid-sixties, both individually and as a member of the ZAJ group (which broke up in 1996). In the early 1960s she set up, together with the painter José Antonio Sistiaga, the first Taller de Libre Expresión [Free Expression Workshop], the seed for a whole range of other, parallel activities, among them an experimental school in Elorrio, in Bizkaia province in the Basque Country. From the mid-seventies onwards, she resumed her visual work, with retouched photographs, installations, paintings based on a series of first names and on the number pi, objects and so on.

In the course of her long career as a performance artist, she has taken part in festivals in Spain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Denmark, Norway, Britain, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Thailand, Japan, Korea and Palestine, among others.

She has exhibited her visual work at: Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), Galerie J. & J. Donguy (Paris), Galerie Lara Vincy (Paris), Galerie Satellite (Paris), Galería Trayecto (Vitoria), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Koldo Mitxelena (San Sebastián), Galeria Àngels (Barcelona), Galeria Trinta (Santiago de Compostela), Galería 1 Mira Madrid, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (Seville), Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art (Denmark), Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), MOCARoma (Mexico City), Museo de Bellas Artes (Rio de Janeiro), ARTIUM (Vitoria), Es Baluard (Palma), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (A Coruña), MAC/VAL (Vitry-sur-Seine, France), CEART (Fuenlabrada), Museo Guggenheim Bilbao and Centre nacional de la danse (Lyon), among others.

She has taught numerous courses at universities, museums and schools of fine art in Canada, France, Italy, Mexico and Switzerland, as well as Spain.

In 1999 she was one of the two artists who represented Spain at the Venice Biennale.

She has won accolades including: Trace: John Boehme Performance Art – Lifetime Achievement Award (2006); the Spanish National Visual Arts Prize (2008); the Basque government’s Gure Artea prize (2012); the MAV prize, the Women in Visual Arts prize (2014); the Marie Claire contemporary art prize (2014); the Velázquez prize (2014); the Golden Drum of the City of Donostia/San Sebastián (2022); the Bernard Heidsieck prize from the Centre Georges Pompidou (2022); and the Francisco Prieto prize from the FNMT, the Spanish national mint (2024).

[Inauguration of the rue Marcel Duchamp in Paris, 1995. Photo: A. Szfran.]