Eva Fàbregas (Barcelona, ??1988) frequently dreams, as she herself says, “of sculptures that pulsate inside a nightclub, that submerge in the ocean or that float in another galaxy. Sculptures that grow, gestate, sweat, breathe, embrace, proliferate.” She makes them a reality and with them she now occupies the rooms of the Centro Botín in Santander and the Hamburger Bahnhof, the national gallery of contemporary art in Berlin, a coincidence that has focused international attention on the Catalan artist.
He has experienced the challenge that the two exhibitions have posed “almost like a science fiction movie, in which this organic growth proliferated uncontrollably in two different places in Europe.” In what we do not see, life beats intensely, so the artist believes that “in a certain sense, the two exhibitions help to imagine that this celebration of resilient life, which stubbornly insists on thriving, persisting and multiplying in diverse ways, has the potential to also emerge in other spaces that we still do not know.” His imagination, to a large extent, is related to animated cinema, which he considers “crucial” to build his sculptural practice, because “cartoons help us imagine that any figure has the ability to alter our reality through resistance to its own instrumentalization and fixed form.” All of this in light of the principle that Eisenstein described as plasmatic, and that Fàbregas interprets as “the omnipotence of the plasma that contains in a liquid form all the possibilities of future species and forms.”
His desire to give shape to the life that pulsates and moves has materialized in large sculptures of lycra meshes filled with balls and air balloons, with shapes that recall guts, worms, tumors, aliens or breasts in pale, almost childlike colors. . They do not leave you indifferent. This 2023 she has received the ARCO Prize from the Community of Madrid for her work Crecimiento In Barcelona, ??she could be seen last year in the Bombon Projects gallery, and she has also exhibited at the Lyon Biennale or places such as the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
The British capital has been key in his career. He went to study at the Chelsea College of Art and Design at the end of 2011, shortly after receiving the Botín Foundation Art Scholarship, and returned to Barcelona this spring, while preparing the exhibition Enredos: “It is the first time that “I notice this circle and it seems like a very nice coincidence,” he says. He returns to Spain with the help of Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, director of exhibitions and the collection of the Centro Botín, to begin an exhibition program with which the institution wants to give visibility and rekindle contact with artists who received the scholarship and are in half of his career.
For the development of Fàbregas, in addition to decisive initial support like this, “when I really learned to trust my own intuition” was key. In London, after studying Fine Arts at the university in Barcelona and not feeling completely comfortable with the predominance of conceptual language, she had the opportunity to learn many different ways of approaching art: “it will sound corny, but for me it was a difficult task.” to start listening to myself and knowing how to listen to the parts of my body that were communicating things to me while I was working.”
She trained as a soprano in childhood and adolescence. She was in a choir with which she “toured internationally, recorded albums, film soundtracks and performed in support of major opera productions.” And although she left music because she had always wanted to be a visual artist, her experience has helped her become aware of the body as an instrument, of the organs that intervene to create the voice with the collaboration of the air.
He conceives the exhibition that houses the imposing Santander building by Renzo Piano as “a desiring machine”, because “I am fascinated by the process by which desires are translated into forms. Technology has always been affective and our affects are intertwined with the technologies we produce. Machines give concrete solid forms to affective, emotional and sexual intensities. We produce them with our bodies, and they produce our bodies. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a dildo, a book, a memory card or an iPhone.”
From the lightness of the air-filled fabric balloons, the Vessels, that open the exhibition, to the changing mountain that is Oozing (oozing) – produced especially for one of the most impressive spaces in the facility and in collaboration with MACBA–, Through his drawings, Fàbregas demonstrates how the growth of the being is composed of movement and time. “Eva is working to not be positioned as if she is making pink inflatable sculptures. She is interested in penetrating architecture, playing with it, breaking it, seeing how her practice can intervene on the walls and the floor,” says Rodríguez Muñoz. Something that the artist herself corroborates: “I believe that the exhibition takes the form of an infection or an uncontrollable growth that arises from the deepest bowels of the Santander Abbey, sneaks through the ducts of the building and overflows and takes over the Exhibition halls”.
The somatic and the passions that move the human being also characterize the works of other artists from the Centro Botín collection that complete the Enredos exhibition. Fàbregas’ sculptures and drawings share space with the works – chosen by herself and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz – by Leonor Antunes, Nora Aurrekoetxea, David Bestué, Cabello/Carceller, Asier Mendizabal and Sara Ramo. They were all worthy of the Botín Foundation Art Scholarship. They are joined, with several photographs, by the Mexican Gabriel Orozco, who taught workshops at the institution. On this occasion, the combination of the different looks, voices and skins that the two curators have brought together has achieved, in Fàbregas’s opinion, “a large-scale living organism that would obey its own libidinal logic.”
Eva Fabregas. Tangles. Curated by Eva Fàbregas and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz. Botín Center. Santander. Until October 15. www.centrobotin.org
