BILBAO.- The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Esther Ferrer. Intertwined Spaces, an exhibition made up almost entirely of previously unseen installations by one of the leading practitioners of performance art in Spain. In keeping with Esther Ferrer’s work and thought, two of the eleven works that make up this show will be specially activated through performances by the artist or the interaction of the public.

Since the start of her career in the late sixties, Esther Ferrer (Donostia/San Sebastián, 1937) has developed her thought through a wide variety of forms and materials, becoming one of Spain’s pioneers of performance art, a genre she defines as “the art that combines time and space with the presence of an audience that is not a mere spectator, but can participate in the action if so wished.”

Above all, Esther Ferrer values the spectator’s freedom, so she offers questions rather than conclusions, enabling interpretations to be generated autonomously by each viewer.

In 1967, Esther Ferrer started to participate in the activities of the Zaj group with Walter Marchetti, Ramón Barce and Juan Hidalgo, and action art has been her main means of expression ever since. From 1970, in parallel with her work with Zaj, she returned to the visual arts in the form of manipulated photographs, installations, paintings and drawings based on series of prime numbers, objects or sound pieces. Her oeuvre is a part of the Minimalist and Conceptual Art movement. When she began to work in the 1960s, she was under the influence of Stéphane Mallarmé, Georges Perec, John Cage, and the feminist theorists of the day.

Her work with Zaj continued with very direct actions until 1996, when the group broke up after a retrospective exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Throughout her extensive career, Ferrer has participated in several action art festivals and has presented works at numerous museums. She has also won multiple awards: in 1999, she represented Spain at the Venice Biennale; in 2008, she was awarded the National Prize in Plastic Arts; in 2012, she received the Gure Artea Prize from the Basque Government; and in 2014, she won the MAV (Women in Visual Arts) Prize, the Marie Claire Award in Contemporary Art, and the Velázquez Award in Plastic Arts.

Entrance to an exhibition ( Entrada a una exposición, 1990/2018)
As the artist explains: “Life is shrouded in the skin, which is a human being’s first clothing, the frontier between two worlds, and, as Paul Valéry wrote, ‘the deepest thing in man’, but at the same time the most superficial, a word that comes from the Latin superficies , based in its turn on facies , a face. The skin is therefore like the surface of a mirror that reflects the depth of which the poet speaks.

Subject of love or aggression, memory, bearer of ritual or object of discrimination, the skin is also a sometimes unyielding source of information about our physical and emotional condition. Above all, however, the skin is the gateway to our sensations owing to its interaction with the nervous system, which transmits them to the brain.”

Entrance to an Exhibition is an installation that tries to raise everyone’s awareness of their own skin through contact with an external element, in this case the sensuality of feathers. The work is designed to arouse sensations, stimulate the viewer’s receptiveness, and increase his or her perceptive capacity by creating a state of pleasurable “alert”, a preparatory stimulus for the visit to the rest of the exhibition. “It’s a matter of feeling, not thinking; the rest of the exhibition is there for that.” The sensory experience brought on by this work contrasts with the type of experience offered in the rest of the show, which is dominated by sobriety, minimum materiality, and the development of abstract ideas and concepts, such as the mathematical schemes underlying her Spatial Projects ( Proyectos espaciales ) .

The Laughs of the World ( Las risas del mundo, 1999/2018)
Humor is indissociable from the work of Esther Ferrer. Indeed, it is her absurd view of society, laden with an irony peculiar to the artist, which allows her to construct an artistic corpus with a markedly critical character.

In The Laughs of the World , the organic, natural and ephemeral sound of the laugh becomes an artistic object by expanding in time and space, leaving the order of its reproduction in the hands of the viewer.

A number of electronic devices are suspended over various points of a large world map on the floor. These are more than forty tablets showing images of mouths that belong to people of different ages, genders and provenances, while reproducing the sound of their laughs. The sound archives are activated by the interaction of visitors, since they are programmed to start every time they are approached, allowing the spontaneous production of what the artist calls “concerts of laughter”. The installation is also designed to activate different laughter groups at random according to the visitors’ position on the map, allowing the public to experience how different cultures and languages mold laughter in different ways.

Installations with chairs ( Instalaciones con sillas, 1984 and 2018)
“I’ve always been interested in chairs, everyday and almost anodyne objects whose mere presence can nonetheless modify the space of a room.” Esther Ferrer has always been struck by the number of models that have been created, and will continue to be created, for something as everyday and elementary as a chair. She is attracted above all by the “anthropomorphic” quality of its structure, regardless of the material from which it is made. For the artist, the sight of a chair makes us think of human beings, with all that might suggest. When stripped of upholstery and decoration, its “skeleton” forms a set of straight or curved lines organized in an almost organic manner. If the structural richness of a chair is combined in a set, either on a wall or in the round, the variety of resulting forms can be fascinating.

Two installations are presented in this exhibition: one is from the 1984 series Installations with Chairs ( Instalaciones con sillas ), and the other from the 2018 series Suspended Chairs ( Sillas suspendidas ). Both projects are here materialized for the first time in an exhibition space.

Spatial Projects ( Proyectos espaciales, 1990/2018)
Esther Ferrer started to work on her Spatial Projects series in the 1970s. The installations shown in this exhibition come from projects in the form of drawings or models that date from 1990 until 2006. The artist used cardboard structures similar to architectural models for her designs.

“I’ve never been especially interested in carrying out my projects in a physical space or on a large scale. If the model works, the work is done as far as I’m concerned. If I can’t set it up in a real space, never mind. What interests me is the process.”

During her creative process, the artist attaches threads to the different planes of the model, measuring regular distances between the connections so that the threads will look like lines running across space in geometrical patterns. Their infinite variations are the motif that gives these works their serial character. By varying only small details, like the number of threads or the distance between them, the mathematical basis for the installation is completely modified and an infinite number of different results are obtained.

For these installations, Esther Ferrer uses threads, wires, elastic bands or string, all fragile everyday materials, and arranges them over the bare walls, the floor and the ceiling, fixing them with clamps or nails. She thus intervenes in the space with a minimum of elements, giving it a new set of characteristics that modify the viewer’s perception.

Ferrer subjects these elements to intense mathematical rigor, positioning the clamps at different intervals measured to generate various rhythms, directions and grids that alter perception of the space and the passage through it. Angles break or fold in the corners, creating a series of geometric forms.

The artist reflects upon space as follows: “In some installations I decide to submit to a rule—it’s a way of eliminating my subjectivity as far as possible—or to a system I’ve decided on, such as the series of prime numbers. On the other hand, there are others I structure in an aleatory fashion, allowing myself to be guided by an intuition that determines the rhythm.”

The reason behind the title of the works in this series, Spatial Instal lations (Instalaciones espaciales), is that the artist sees them as resembling drawing in space. She conceives three-dimensional drawings with no perspectival simulacrum, since it is they which create the perspective themselves, marking out the space, occupying it, and above all defining and transforming it with their mere presence. This transformation is best perceived when the viewer contemplates it in movement, visualizing the different perspectives.

In the artist’s own words, “space is not the support of the work but its raw material; both natural and architectural space, which it appropriates, generally using the fewest elements possible. My concern is not to intervene too much, not to get in its way, so that it remains transparent and air can flow through. This is perhaps one of the reasons why I usually construct my installations with thin threads or wires. I look for efficacy. No decorative features or adornments, just the essential.”