13.02.14
Esther Ferrer
Esther Ferrer: Face B. Image/Autoportrait, MAC VAL (Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne).15.02.14 > 13.07.14
To launch the 2014 season, the MAC/VAL is honoring Esther Ferrer, pioneer of action and performance art, in a solo exhibition based on her self portraits created since the 1970s. Bringing together installations, videos and over a hundred photographs, the present exhibition reveals how aspects of the body and its transformations have nourished Ferrer’s art from its earliest days.
This second event follows a 2013 exhibition at the Frac Bretagne devoted to commemorating Ferrer’s performance art. Esther Ferrer seeks to define her own individuality, using her body as a tool for creation and expression with both simplicity and radicalism. Although she is the primary subject of her own work, her production functions as an offering of the self, a straightforward method for making and saying things without the addition of superfluous props or decor in an utter austerity and economy of means.
She stages her own body to observe the world evolve in time and space. The work of Esther Ferrer blends humor, laughter, the absurd, irony, derision, and formal economy.
Hers is an art without compromise, brut, if not brutal, at times violent, but also eminently political. Although her primary purpose lies elsewhere, from the beginning, Ferrer’s art has been both social and political – before being an artist, she is a feminist, an anarchist, and a political activist.
For nearly fifty years, her coherent, crafted and constant message has always been an invitation to freedom, one that remains in perfect resonance with the present.
Tags: exhibition, video
El libro de las cabezas, "Eurorretrato", 2002. Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.
Exhibition view, Esther Ferrer "Face B. Image /Autoportrait", MAC/VAL 2014.Photo © Martin Argyroglo.