Programs

Visual Art

STEADY

17 April 2024 – 8 September 2024

Installation view, STEADY: Michelle Lopez and Ester Partegàs, April 17–September 8, 2024, Ballroom Marfa.

Exhibition

Michelle Lopez & Ester Partegàs

Opening Celebrations: Saturday, April 20, 2024

5–8pm

Ballroom Marfa is pleased to present a new exhibition, STEADY on view beginning April 17, 2024 with opening celebrations on Saturday, April 20 from 5–8pm with an artist walkthrough from 5–6pm. The exhibition brings sculptures by Michelle Lopez and Ester Partegàs together for the first time.

The word steady implies a continuous state of becoming balanced, developed, and supported. The act of steadying requires a physical, structural, and conceptual interdependence. In this two-person exhibition, Lopez and Partegàs’s precarious, playful, and powerful works harness physical and material components –– even using the ground below and the air above. Instead of separation and assertion, there is a counterbalance.

Perhaps what you see is not what you see, disrupting the popular principle of Minimalism. With the works on view, there are cues for us to look within – as seen in Lopez’s “hyper-rope” sculptures – and behind or far underneath into the subconscious, as seen in Partegàs’s tunnels. How we understand the world around us cannot always be seen; sexuality, gender, and race, for example, are embodied. Forms of violence are not always visible, as we’ve come to know in patriarchal, supremacist, technological systems that have caused harm.

The works in STEADY make us question how the world is built, and why. The exhibited works offer a broader reflection on the balance of power through form, as it extends into the world at large. How we think about spatiality and materiality, is also how we know how to inhabit, hold, share, and gather in space.

STEADY is organized by Daisy Nam, former Ballroom Marfa Executive Director and Curator with Sarah Melendez. The exhibition will travel to the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts.

Artist Profiles

Michelle Lopez

Michelle Lopez (b. 1970, Bridgeport; lives and works in New York and Philadelphia) received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York (1994) and a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University (1992). Lopez is an Associate Professor in Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania and head of the sculpture program.

Lopez is known for her rigorous conceptual practice and boldly experimental approach to processes and material. Her installations and sculptural works are grounded in research on the iconography of cultural phenomena. Lopez riffs off of our relationship to “products” by combining forms of Capitalism with contradictory materials, such as her leather-covered car, Boy. Lopez examines historical forms by building abject structures out of minimal debris. Her crumpled aluminum and stainless steel work, Blue Angels, exemplifies a technological failure while also considering the performative element of the artist’s body via sculpture. Her sound and kinetic installation, Halyard, is a further iteration of examining invisible structures of power in relation to Western Empire.

Her solo exhibitions have been held at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2019); Simon Preston, New York (2018); Alt, Protocinema, Istanbul (2016); Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris (2016); and Fondazione Trussardi, Milan (2001). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Protocinema, Philadelphia (2020); i8, Reykjavik (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2017); Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge (2017); MoMA PS1, Queens (2000); and Public Art Fund, New York (2000). Lopez is a recipient of Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Grant (2023), Sachs Program for Arts Innovation Grant (2019), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2019), and New York Foundation for the Arts Sculpture Fellowship (2011). is an interdisciplinary sculptor and installation artist. She has taught at University of California Berkeley, Yale School of Art, the School of Visual Arts, and is Director of Sculpture & Installation in the Fine Arts Program at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Ester Partegàs

Ester Partegàs (Barcelona, 1972) is an artist who creates conditions of possibility for building forms of relation against the backdrop of global flows of capital and their attendant power structures. She dismembers, recombines and reuses low cost materials in her hand-built sculptures that focus attention on the systems of value with which we live. Partegàs also draws closely on her personal history addressing experiences, and effects, of disjunction and dislocation.

Partegàs has shown extensively, nationally and internationally. Most recent shows include TEA Tenerife (2023), Palazzo Delle Exposition, Rome (2023) NoguerasBlanchard, Madrid (2022 solo); Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2021); Essex Flowers (2021); Pure Joy, Marfa TX (2020, solo); Conde Duque, Madrid (2020); The Drawing Center, NY (2019); the Museum of the City of NY (2019); Transborder Biennial / Bienal Transfronteriza, El Paso Museum of Art + Museo de Arte Ciudad Juárez (2018). Other shows include MACBA Barcelona; Sculpture Center, NY; Artist’s Space, NY; Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; Public Art Fund, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria; Whitechapel Gallery, London; MACRO Museum/Depart Foundation, Rome; and the Moscow, Busan and Athens Biennials among others.

She was the recipient of the 2022-2023 Rome Prize for Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome, a 2014 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, and a 2004 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2004), among others. She has been an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa TX; MacDowell, and Skowhegan, among others. She has been faculty at the Yale School of Art, Virginia Commonwealth University, SUNY Purchase and since 2016 at Parsons School of Design. Based in New York City, she is a part-time resident of Marfa TX and Barcelona.

Acknowledgements

This exhibition is generously supported by The Ruth Foundation; City of Marfa; The Brown Foundation Inc.; Leberman Family Foundation; Ballroom Marfa Board of Trustees and International Surf Club Founders: Rachel & Jeff Arnold, Louisa Stude Sarofim, Sara Carter, Eleanor Acquavella Dejoux, Christopher Hill, and Alex Logsdail; with support from Commonwealth and Council.