Esther Ferrer, Spain

Born in 1937 in San Sebastian. Lives and works in Paris.

Esther Ferrer's work spans four decades of international avant-garde activity. Although internationally recognisied for her work in performance art, both as solo artist and as a member of the seminal Spanish group ZAJ , she has also consistently produced installations. She has exhibited her work globally and represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 1999. In 2008 she was awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas, the National Prize of Visual Arts, by the Spanish ministry of Cultural Affairs.  Her installations are sometimes born out of her performances and sometimes the opposite occurs. She also finds, however, that performance and installation are inseparable: 'Like the two faces of a coin'. Whatever the formal context, Esther Ferrer¹s work can be thought of as a particular type of minimalism that integrates rigour with absurdity.David Perex has noted; 'While the artist carefully places a large glass on her head, we try to find the hidden mechanism by which the object was chosen.
Entering that secret dynamic, we try compulsively to discover the raison d'etre which, in the language of logic and the syntex of reason, could justify - even in a crude and clumsy manner - what is in truth always unjustifiable: the presence of some things that, despite, acquiring life through our presence, are fully independent of it.'

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Esther Ferrer. Infr'Action - Festival International d'Art Performance. Sète. 2006.