San Francisco
Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
In “STEADY” (on view through April 12, 2025), Michelle Lopez and Ester Partegàs engage in a dialogue with each other, as well as with art history, through idiosyncratic forms that deftly foreground a variety of issues and ideas. Visually weightless (or nearly so), yet radiating a kind of tensile strength, Lopez’s linear steel sculptures skewer the self-important heaviness of male-dominated Minimalism while seemingly denying gravity. Partegàs, in imagery influenced by domesticity and motherhood, uses papier-mâché and found materials to examine the value systems with which we try to live in a society driven by hyper-capitalism, alternately invoking Andy Warhol and Jessica Stockholder.
Taken as a whole, Lopez’s and Partegàs’s contributions to “STEADY” boldly subvert the idea of sculpture as monument. Each work is placed directly on a floor covered with dark red carpeting that stops short of the walls by several inches—an addition to the Wattis’s austere concrete-and-glass environment that somehow becomes an all-inclusive pedestal while slyly disregarding rules dictating the “correct” way to experience contemporary art. The exhibition was previously presented at Texas’s Ballroom Marfa—Judd territory, where Minimalism and what Wattis curator Daisy Nam describes as “the return of patriarchal, hetero-masculine authoritarianism in politics and society” (still) dominates. Nam sees the work of Lopez and Partegàs as having the potential to swerve around this legacy, questioning the use (and abuse) of power through experimentation with color, materials, and the definition of sculpture itself.
Since the late ’90s, Lopez has created singular sculptures and larger installations, using a variety of materials that range from leather to metal scaffolding, to fragments of architecture. In many works, she wields a feminist perspective to deconstruct the self-importance of 1960s icons by hand-twisting strands of steel, one of that period’s favored materials, into a kind of animated “hyper-rope.” In THREE ROPE PROP (2023), she forms this “rope” into outlines that echo the four balanced steel plates in Richard Serra’s One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969). Unlike Serra’s textbook touchstone—infamous for having once accidentally killed an art installer—Lopez’s work, eviscerated of mass and substance, is inviting, welcoming examination through as well as around its open shapes, the gleaming steel torched and bent into rectangles through the artist’s sheer force of will. Other twisted steel works in the show are covered with flocking or gilding paint, both in pastel hues, but the hot pink of the nylon-coated, 10-by-10-foot SINGLE LINES/ROPE HENGE (2024), situated in the garden outside the gallery, is apparently a departure. In a gallery talk, Lopez mentioned having long resisted the color because of its association with post-Minimalism’s feminist movement, despite her clear intention to take down sculpture’s macho posturing.
These experiments with inventing a kind of meta-sculpture are answered in Partegàs’s evocations of the humble laundry basket, turned upside down and rendered many times larger than life in papier-mâché and cardboard. Deceptively simple, Two Moons (laundry baskets) (2024) conveys what Partegàs describes as a sense of imminent collapse. A gap between the basket’s two halves is bridged by a dowel from which a smallish disco ball hangs on a bit of orange string. To amplify the overall sense of handmade precarity, Partegàs replaced several of the basket’s handmade slats with additional dowels, as if the two halves could not support their own weight without prosthetic assistance.
Like Serra’s steel slabs, the parts of this sculpture are balanced on each other, but in ways that de-emphasize the weight of power rather than valorizing it—possibly calling up memories of tasks involving such baskets. Partegàs describes her use of such “humble” forms and materials as a way to bridge the gap between art and life. The colors that she employs—soft pinks, yellows, and oranges—refer to the consumer objects on which the forms are based. In this context, they also create a visual connection to Lopez’s sculptures, reminding us that these two artists, as different as their work and lives may be, share the experiences of being women, mothers, and immigrants, all of which are to greater or lesser degrees embodied in what they make.
Both artists describe engaging in a direct dialogue with materials, without preconceived ideas of the outcome. Lopez has talked about the pleasure she derives from the experiences engendered by such directness—the physicality of exerting force, finding form through interaction. Partegàs achieves her avowed goal to challenge boundaries by deliberately focusing on commonplace objects, echoing Georges Perec’s “infra-ordinary”: the world in which laundry baskets and cleaning pads (incorporated into Half [2024]) play a significant, yet largely unnoticed role.
Nam, in her catalogue essay, asserts that “the act of steadying is an act of power,” requiring interdependence and collaboration. Taking a turn on the gallery’s improbable red carpet, these anti-monuments by Lopez and Partegàs perfectly embody our uncertain present, reminding us that we can choose resistance to closed systems and ideas.
