Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Poema números primos [Poem of Prime Numbers]

Image caption
ESTHER FERRER

Poema números primos [Poem of Prime Numbers]

  • 1983
  • Felt pen and pencil on graph paper
  • 16 x 16 cm
  • Cat. D_343
  • Acquired in 2013
By:
Isabel Tejeda

Esther Ferrer says that she woke after dreaming of a sea of numbers and realised that they were all prime numbers. She began to use prime numbers such as pi as a symbol of the infinite and the eternal. Using mathematics enabled her to work with norms outside herself, with pre-established laws. She was thus able to shed her own personal semiotic systems, which she felt were clearly tainted by subjectivity. The drawings in the Banco de España Collection show numbers calculated by the artist without the help of any technology. Her works thus include an extra dimension in the form of the production time entailed by data processing. They are made with basic, ordinary materials that anyone might have at home, and are put together simply. Perfection of form is not sought, and corrections in calculations are offered almost as apologies. Numbers are laid out on the paper to form a spiral, stemming from a central vortex and opening out towards infinity. Esther Ferrer works as follows: first she sets the numbers in place, then she creates links between them, producing groups of coloured lines that fill in the gaps where the compound numbers should be.

These works are preliminary sketches, sheet music for action art, ideas for projects, etc. The Banco de España Collection also owns the sketches with threads that show how two of her installations were to be put together.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Esther Ferrer
Donostia / San Sebastian 1937

Esther Ferrer studied art in Paris and holds a degree in Social Science and Journalism.

In the early 1960s she set up the Taller de Libre Expresión ['Free Expression Workshop'] together with José Antonio Sistiaga. In 1967 she joined Zaj, an experimental group founded by Ramón Barce, Juan Hidalgo and Walter Marchetti that used musical parameters as a basis for action art, happenings and mail-art. They were invited to the USA by John Cage and staged many performances there. Following that trip Ferrer decided not to live in Francoist Spain any longer, and went into exile in France. There, she continued to work with Zaj until the group broke up in 1996, but at the same time she embarked on a solo creative career. From the 1970s onwards her work in action art was supplemented by a great many visual art works, covering photography, installations, paintings and objects, all of which she saw as resources that could play a role in documenting or triggering actions.

Her links to the Fluxus movement meant that she produced works grounded in humour and the poetry of the absurd. She is on record as saying that 'an expression that I like very much as a definition of my work is “the rigour of the absurd”’. Inside and outside her works, she explores time, memory, movement and the infinite (through prime numbers and repetitions), striving to understand reality from a viewpoint marked by a social ideology and feminist discourse.

Esther Ferrer represented Spain at the 1999 Venice Biennale, together with Manolo Valdés. She won the National Award for Plastic Arts in 2008 and the Velázquez Award for Fine Arts in 2014.

Over the course of her career she has taken part in a great many exhibitions, concerts and festivals of action art, at venues that include Chateâu de Nancel (France, 1974), the Miró Foundation (Barcelona, 1984); the Georges Pompidou Centre (Paris, 1986), the Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1994 & 2017), the Tàpies Foundation (Barcelona, 1997), the International Centre for Poetry in Marseille (France, 1998), the Museet for Samtidskunst (Roskilde, Denmark, 2000), the Rey Alfonso Henriques Foundation (Toro, Zamora, 2003), the University Museum of Science and Art (Mexico City, 2007), the Trinta Gallery (Santiago de Compostela, 2008), the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country (Vitoria-Gasteiz (2011)), the Tomás y Valiente Art Centre (Fuenlabrada, Madrid, 2016) and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2018).

Isabel Tejeda

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2.