Interview to Esther Gatón (b. 1988) lives and works between Madrid, Spain and London, U.K.
We begin this interview in the rooms of Tú, tú, tú, mi incesante, artist Esther Gatón’s latest solo show at the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid.
There are artists who struggle to speak about their work, but not Esther. Her words trap you, and when I think back on our conversation, many of the images she described come to mind, seated as she was before a second-floor window overlooking the stone courtyard. It seemed as though everything around us — the building, the open sky, the questions themselves — led her to recall her past and the traces of it that still remain in her work. Broken toys, medieval churches, wheat fields, and horizons crossed by handmade wooden airplanes. Also some more kitsch inspirations: the children’s section of hardware stores, Polly Pockets, neighborhood shop windows, and provincial bars lit by glaring blue neon lights.
What became clear during the interview is that someone like Esther could only devote herself to art — something she understands, above all, as a radical form of freedom.
We begin this interview in the rooms of Tú, tú, tú, mi incesante, artist Esther Gatón’s latest solo show at the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid.
There are artists who struggle to speak about their work, but not Esther. Her words trap you, and when I think back on our conversation, many of the images she described come to mind, seated as she was before a second-floor window overlooking the stone courtyard. It seemed as though everything around us — the building, the open sky, the questions themselves — led her to recall her past and the traces of it that still remain in her work. Broken toys, medieval churches, wheat fields, and horizons crossed by handmade wooden airplanes. Also some more kitsch inspirations: the children’s section of hardware stores, Polly Pockets, neighborhood shop windows, and provincial bars lit by glaring blue neon lights.
What became clear during the interview is that someone like Esther could only devote herself to art — something she understands, above all, as a radical form of freedom.
To begin this conversation, we wanted to tell you that part of the interest of these interviews is to speak not only about the work, but about the person and the creative process behind it, which takes place in the studio. We weren’t sure if it would work in a public space, but seeing the kind of exhibition you’ve proposed, we believe we can achieve that sense of closeness.
I agree; I’d say this is perhaps the most intimate show I’ve ever done. I have put it together with the curator Rafael Barber Cortell, whom I’ve known well for years. By working with someone so familiar with my work, my origins, and the changes I’ve gone through, we’ve been able to weave together a complex, plural exhibition that brings together different kinds of works. Also, the museum has given us freedom.
Along the lines of what you say, we’ve brought into the gallery something that usually happens in the studio: a space where pieces coexist that don’t look alike and weren’t made at the same time, but which, in that variety, help each other grow. This is also the first time someone has connected my practice with virgins and other religious imagery in the curatorial text. Something that, however, was very present while I was growing up: my father was a church architect and, although I no longer belong to that world, I think a strong sensitivity from that life remains in my work. A vocation for creating spaces that are meant to be inhabited, where a certain atmosphere persists, as sometimes happens in temples.
Image courtesy of the artist. Tú, tú, tú, mi incesante, 2026, Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid. Photograph by Victor Hugo Marín Caballero.
You’ve talked about the idea of reacting to a space when planning your exhibitions. Specifically, what elements have caught your attention in this case?
The museum building—an example of sober, solemn Spanish classicism that was first a fortress and later a monastery—is part of the exhibition, and so is its light. In the rooms of Tú, tú, tú, mi incesante, there are quite a few plays of shadow in combination with natural and artificial light. I’ve enjoyed using these effects as one more sculptural material.
Also, the gallery is on the second floor, next to the courtyard, and it has two entrances set at right angles to each other. You enter the exhibition from the outside light, with that whitish brightness so typical of the “meseta”. Here, there’s sometimes fog, but when the sun hits, it’s blinding. The show takes place during spring and summer, so I couldn’t help but incorporate those conditions. At the same time, the museum’s floor, made of cream-coloured Campaspero limestone, enhances the shadows and favours these chiaroscuro effects.
It’s essential to visit the exhibition in person because it’s built over time and through movement, along its route. Almost from the moment you enter the museum, I feel that the show seeps into the building, rather than the other way around. The first artwork is heard before it’s seen: it’s a work made with bells and pompom wool. It’s conceived through its echoes. The bells are knotted into the wool so that, when they jingle, they produce different tones and also make use of the patio’s resonance.
Image courtesy of the artist. Tú, tú, tú, mi incesante, 2026, Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid. Photograph by Victor Hugo Marín Caballero.
Does it have something of a theatrical stage?
Yes, maybe, but in motion: like a fairground cart that carries you along [laughs].
There’s a very narrative aspect to the layout of the space, isn’t there?
True. There are like three “moments” that could correspond to the setup, the development, and the conclusion. And then, there’s a coming back. We imagined that each moment could stimulate a different rhythm. The first one (the bell) wakes you up; the central one is full of stimuli coming from multiple places; and the third (the well), quite the opposite, works as an emptying out or drainage.
Image courtesy of the artist. Tú, tú, tú, mi incesante, 2026, Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid. Photograph by Victor Hugo Marín Caballero.There’s also something quite in media res about these works. That thing you were mentioning: bringing the studio space into the exhibition space.
Yes, I feel that when I work, the “habitat” I’m in, with all its specificities, seeps into the work. It happens to many of us. That’s why I find what you’re doing so valuable: visiting artists’ studios and showing their pieces from there. The work is understood better when you step into the environment that generates it. The temperature, the light, the humidity, the views, the noises, the space and its surroundings… Without us noticing, all those elements of the environment gradually give shape to the creations, to their character, and to the materials they’re made of.
Let’s say this show plays with and, at the same time, reveals the artifice; that is, the making. We show the trick, the sleight of hand, the effects, the “B-side” of the work and of the act of looking. I once heard someone say, “Seeing flight is like flying.” I think that’s true: something of the action we witness rubs off on us. Maybe that’s why I enjoy it when art makes me want to make things. Even if this making isn’t so clearly defined and produces elements (processes, ways of doing) that one doesn’t fully recognise.
Would you say it’s been particularly moving for you to exhibit in this museum, in Valladolid, your hometown?
Absolutely. Also, I feel I’ve gradually grown into the project, and the show has been almost like a “return”. When I started working on this exhibition, I was living in London and, through it, I’ve come to realise that you can’t renounce your origins. The sensitive forms are there, no matter how far you go. Something of the territory where we grew up can be recognised in the work, in its character. That’s why it’s revealing to situate a practice in its roots. It fits.
And would you know how, or be willing, to put into words that specifically “Castilian something” you recognize in your work?
I might fall into stereotypes here, but I’ll try. I think that in Castile there’s something in the way language is organised, in the rawness of the way people speak, in the dry land, the extreme temperatures, and the wide, sparsely populated landscapes that I perceive in the work.
For example, in this exhibition, there is a lot of silence and large, empty spaces. It may be that growing up in a place like Castile trains you to look in a particular way, with an open, ever-changing sky. Possibly, if you grow up among mountains or buildings, you have a different way of looking around.
Then there are those extreme temperatures—very cold winters, very hot summers, few in-between weeks—that make everything in Castile rather concentrated; flavours are strong and intense, and people’s character tends to be resilient and reserved. I think that, in some way, this also appears in the surfaces of my work, which are often dense, with hardly any smooth areas. And that rawness of speech shows up in the work; the pieces are not perfected or refined, but displayed with their layers and scars open.
Later, I began to realise that in Castile, many of the iconic sites we visit and which are carried in processions are in a state of disrepair, such as buildings in ruins and vandalised religious statues.
What has it meant for you to show such a personal part of your work in an institutional space?
I’ve felt comfortable. I haven’t thought much about whether it’s personal or not, because, the way I see it, art is for someone else. I mean that, although inevitably some personal matters and experiences serve as “available material” to work with, I think that art is bigger than the person who makes it. It goes its own way.
One thing that always stands out to me in your work are the titles of the pieces and exhibitions. When I read this one, I loved it. Beyond how evocative it is, it seemed to me that it had something to do with others, like Kids Don’t Run Around The Patio. It will seem bigger or Emil Lime, in their circularity or sonic repetition. Is that something you specifically look for?I hadn’t thought of it that way. Thank you. That’s what I love about conversations: there are things that happen that I don’t consciously notice, but they’re there. Exactly what you’re describing happens in the work. The path to traverse the exhibition is part of the piece. It’s never about isolated works; they’re linked together. When I install, I try to understand how one moves through the space, and I build the exhibitions as a succession of viewpoints.
The title, Tú, tú, tú, mi incesante, is a verse by Jorge Guillén, a poet of the Generation of 27, born in Valladolid and later exiled due to the Franco Regime. I chose it as a tribute and a sign of gratefulness. Using the work of another creator is also a way to show the chain of creation and acknowledge where we come from.
Also, the verse conveys an intensity that I think connects with my way of working and with how I feel during the process. It has an onomatopoeic quality that I love. The sound, its pronunciation, practically behaves like another material. That voiceless, dental plosive “T”... And, of course, it has to do with addressing the other person. The “You, you, you” is like pointing: an insistence that this is going toward someone, toward a person beyond the artist. And, as you’ve pointed out, it also implies movement.
In fact, something that helped me better understand your practice—which can be considered somewhat cryptic—was starting to see you not only as a visual artist, but also as a poet or writer. I wanted to ask whether you conceive your visual practice as a form of writing, or your procedure as something poetic, understanding the poetic as something that allows very free associations between elements, a certain sublimity.
I like how you put it. I don’t make too many distinctions between media; I feel that they all happen at the same time. For example, we can’t be sure that when one writes, sculptural elements don’t appear in that process, or vice versa.
Writing is what I do most often, because it can be done anywhere, almost in any way. And of course, when you have a frequent relationship with words, that feeds into the manual. My technical sheets, for instance, play a major role in the exhibitions. They serve to combine words like ash, foam, seaweed, varnish, burnt doll skin, bell, pompoms, motor… Almost feel like Dada poems in themselves.
You’ve mentioned that your father was a church architect. You also quote several texts—for example, States of the Body Produced by Love, by Nisha Ramayya, and La Casa de la Niebla, by Elena Anníbali—that have a very spiritual background. I’d like you to tell us a bit more in depth what that relationship with religion has been like.As a child, I was a believer. Back then, I wanted to be a saint. People would say to me, “Santa Claus?” and I’d be like, “No, no…” I had in mind my own little religious order and everything [More laughter]. Because, of course, at home, I read the lives of the saints as if they were comics for kids. I know what it is to go to confession, to pray… I grew up in all that. I remember once stealing a tiny Polly Pocket doll and suddenly feeling a very strong awareness that I had sinned.
I left all that behind. For a long time, I didn’t talk about it. But you can’t deny where you come from. In my case, it’s been quite a long journey. It wasn’t just my father, it was everything around me: school, people, the atmosphere, customs, Holy Week taking over the whole city… Being able to change my context has happened in stages and with help.
My way of looking at it has changed over time. Now, in fact, I find it valuable to connect with several worlds and to approach that social spirituality with respect and curiosity. I think that religiosity is present in everyone, as something embedded in the times. You can feel it in morality, in customs, in our sense of modesty or shame. It’s really complex.
Image courtesy of the artist. Tú, tú, tú, mi incesante, 2026, Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid. Photograph by Victor Hugo Marín Caballero.
And how do you think that relationship with spirituality may have affected your art?
I think that in those types of environments, there’s something of magical thinking that can be very fertile for artistic practice. It helps you be comfortable with not understanding and to constantly handle language symbolically. And of course: street theatre, notions of community, that of transubstantiation, making the absent present, rituals… All of that makes up an immense, timeless, aesthetic experience.
In my case, this trait is heightened, but I would say that in international contemporary art, there’s a close relationship between its symbolic, expressive forms and the different religious inheritances of each place. It’s not consciously done but part of a collective imaginary; it’s in all of us. For anyone interested in this topic, Brian P. Levack’s research, The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West, is brilliant.
These spiritualities are interwoven with something fascinating: the wisdom of popular culture, which often anticipates science. It’s a social intelligence, very attentive to the environment, to subtlety, to repetitions… You can see it, for example, in nutrition. The most cutting-edge medicine talks about the gut and its connection to emotions and the brain, but that was already being expressed in phrases like “I can’t digest this situation”. Language already knew it.
Are you perhaps talking about a more sociological or cultural dimension of religion that has affected you and that you maintain in your work?
Yes, I would agree with that. I think such a dimension is part of our history, and one does not need to belong to a faith to connect with what those sacred spaces generate. I remember that, as a kid, I was fascinated by going to mass because of the atmosphere it created: the lights, the smell, the ambience, the blurred images… I’d go to the back of the church and, lying on the floor, I’d stare at the ceiling. Now I think that something of that remains in my work, and that I conceive of exhibition rooms as a “whole” in which to be, looking around.
It’s been incredible to talk about this with Rafa. He wrote a beautiful text for Concreta, in which he talks about his experience of Corpus Christi in Valencia (Purpurina entre los dedos. La potencialidad queer del Corpus Christi, Concreta, Spring 2023). Rafa writes about how that event created a space where he could express his difference without being judged by social conventions. Both of us grew up in small-town religious contexts where we didn’t fit in, but which, at the same time, shaped our sensitivity and camouflage strategies.
On the one hand, such contexts allow for a kind of normative exceptionality; in many ways, they are also aesthetically out of time and out of modernity. For instance, they put into circulation images of an unusual, sensual and carnal force, and they allow men to devote themselves to tasks considered feminine. In addition, these environments teach you to develop strategies and to hide. You move away from what was supposedly laid out for you, and you find cracks through which to start opening up other conversations. They’re perforated social spaces.
Image courtesy of the artist. Tú, tú, tú, mi incesante, 2026, Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid. Photograph by Victor Hugo Marín Caballero.
Continuing that exploration of the past, in your exhibition Kids Don’t Run Around the Patio. It Will Seem Bigger (Affiliate WIELS, Brussels, 2025), the curator Piero Bisello wrote a beautiful text linking those works—some of which are also here in the museum—with childhood. Why do you think you’ve recently become interested in exploring an imaginary related to infancy?
It’s an interesting question. It’s true that the first time the theme of childhood appeared so directly was last year, with Kids Don’t Run Around The Patio. It’ll Seem Bigger. Perhaps this happened because Piero is the father of a small girl, and I was working with clay to make dolls. So that theme and that material took on a different kind of presence.
The conversation with Rafa was already underway while I was doing the Brussels show, so some of the themes probably overlapped. However, I also find this “childlike background” in earlier works: in the large, enveloping pieces, or when I’ve worked with the idea of disorientation. Sometimes I think the theme is always there, because the stages of life aren’t overcome; rather, they accumulate. We move from one to another in an instant, and the so-called inner child always ends up resurfacing.
Image courtesy of the artist.—Kids, Don’t Run Around the Patio. It Will Seem Bigger, 2025. Affiliate WIELS, Brussels. Photograph by Fabrice Schneider.
Do you draw on your own memories when dealing with this theme, or is it something more general?
When I meet with curators, the conversations are often full of anecdotes. It almost feels as if our stories, and whatever emerges from them, are a starting point for the work. However, all of this is distorted, and all childhoods—like love stories—though different, share similarities.
In my case, I grew up in a house full of children, a bit chaotic. There was always something broken, a drawer that wouldn’t close, toys mixed with other objects, and people coming and going. A children’s world was created that adults didn’t fully access, with its own laws. As a child, I feel like all you want is to grow up. You’re constantly wanting to spy on adults and, at the same time, trying to run away from them and their rules. You use space for that: you hide under the table, inside a wardrobe, behind the sofa… You listen to what you’re not supposed to, and you get up to mischief.
There’s a very creative dimension to those small transgressions and acts of spying. The child is permanently testing boundaries and drawing conclusions. For example, with small domestic graffiti. A mark, a little drawing, a sticker. Sometimes I think that’s where I first started learning how to make exhibitions.
In our house, my father’s hobbies also played a leading role; he spent hours making aeroplane-modelling pieces. That filled the house with remnants, open machines, broken junk, and rudimentary tools he used to improve the balance of a wing or repair helmets. The kitchen was like a scrapyard. In fact, the first sculptures I ever exhibited came from there—from taking the leftovers of the planes my father and brothers built and reassembling them, again, a bit secretly.
Along those lines, you’ve spoken several times about “cooking” materials. You’ve also quoted John Baldessari, who says that you make art because you can’t help it. There seems to be something very vital in your relationship with art, as if you saw it almost like sleeping or eating.
[Laughs] I agree with what Baldessari says.
It’s as you describe it: my work depends on the conditions in which it’s made. I moved back to Madrid last summer and decided to work without a studio. I wanted artmaking to be something that could happen all the time, anywhere, not just in a designated space. That logistical decision felt strange to me, with a different kind of schedule and different kinds of visits. When I’ve needed space to work on larger sculptures, I’ve been lent a place for a while, or I’ve managed to do it another way.
Maybe at some point this will change, but for now I want to maintain that closeness to the work and be able to do it at any moment, like writing. Not having to separate those processes.
In some texts you talk about your creative process: you’re in the studio, you go out, you see a sunset, then you’re inspired by some logos at the supermarket… Very different things. Is there any common thread between those images? Is there some kind of recurring feeling or element that particularly attracts you?
I do think there are recurrences. A while ago, I made some collages with photos I’d taken on my phone, and I found several patterns: translucent surfaces, slightly absurd encounters between elements (a stuffed toy in a strange place, objects out of place), lots of street, bars, decorative and makeup details, shop windows, floors…
This “not looking” for images but finding them afterwards is also related to how I choose the materials I use. Often it’s a bit of a fluke. I go for one thing and end up buying another. I think you have to let yourself be carried along by that unexpected “something.”
For example, I’ll go to a building materials store to get something very specific (a tool, a fixing) and I end up in the rubbertoy section at the back, by the till. On those little shelves, they set up to reward kids who don’t want to be there while their parents buy stuff to fix up the garden, for example. And there I am, taking the bait [laughs]. There’s something in those secondary, decorative objects that intrigues me: their exaggeration or hyperbolic tone, the collisions between form and meaning that they generate when they show up anywhere.
Would you say, then, that you’re interested in decoration as a way of humanizing spaces, of making them one’s own?
Yes, I think decoration is neither innocent nor neutral. You often hear “this is very decorative,” almost as a way of disparaging a work, and that bothers me. And in fact, because it bothered me so much [laughs], I discovered that the etymology of the word “decoration” is linked to “docence”, teaching.
That helps me underline that decoration has to do with both how a world is built and how different ways of life are transmitted. In other words, decorating is also a form of agency and a way to transform how we live together.
In a text about the exhibition Bitter Cornices (Partial Versions, Cambridge 2025), you talked about the symbolism of the corridor and of certain domestic spaces. I wonder: do you work with the symbolism of spaces and materials, beyond the purely perceptual?
Yes, I think it’s valuable to pay attention to what each space is already saying in itself, to its connotations and stories, before the exhibition enters it. In Bitter Cornices, this aspect was very present because the exhibition space itself was very special: it was a Victorian house in Cambridge, the kind that used to be built for railway workers. So it was a highly coded place in which, on top of that, the curator lived. The house and its location already said so much that it made sense to let those elements take part in the show.
The same thing happens with materials. They all carry their connotations, their social place, and their way of behaving. I like working with common elements—pompom wool, ash, gelatin bubbles, that sort of thing—because of the sense of closeness they evoke. I tend to look for materials according to the verbs they allow or insinuate. I like those that can be sprinkled, that resonate, evaporate, harden, liquefy, dissolve, puff up…
Imagen cedida por la artista. Bitter Cornices, 2025, Partial Versions, Cambridge. Fotografía de Stephen James.You’ve pointed to Anne Carson as an inspiration; she’s a curious figure who moves between the artistic, the academic, and the poetic, without really fitting into fixed categories. I wanted to ask whether you identify with that kind of figure, and if you understand art as a way of unlearning or deconstructing certain notions and structures.
It’s nice that you see me that way, because I have the feeling that, as an artist, I’ve grown a bit “from the outside.” I’ve often felt somewhat unloyal to what I was hearing about what an artist was supposed to be and how they were supposed to work. I believe in the production of the medium, of the genre, and of the way of life, in addition to the work itself. I think art needs to be something that unsettles, stretches, and breaks things open; never something that reinforces structures, not even those of art.
I love Carson’s lectures because they combine classical theory, performance, comedy… She’s fantastic. She opens up the field for the rest of us.
You talk about rejecting certain structures of the art industry, but I wonder whether there is also something more essential in your work itself, in its own language—a search for a certain rawness. In some texts you mention a state prior to symbol or meaning, an almost childlike language.
Yes, it goes beyond the industry. But I don’t reject those structures; I work within them without fully buying into them, trying to question them through conversations with peers and through certain changes.
As you point out, in the work, this has to do with something broader, related to language itself. The most powerful things are said “outside” the words, around them, let’s say. We humans are very subtle, and we communicate more through “minor” things (tone of voice, gaze, posture, jokes, repetitions, slips…) than through what we actually “mean to say”. As we were saying earlier, life stages aren’t exactly overcome, but pile up. They remain present in us each time. It’s not that I’m so interested in childlike language in itself, but rather in the forms of listening that, even as adults, we practice in order to read around words and try to grasp a situation, just like children do as they grow up.
You experience something like this very intensely when you speak a language that isn’t your own, or when you find yourself in a new social situation where you don’t yet know the established codes. Then this kind of expanded attention, almost fearful and circling around what one thinks is being said, continues throughout life; and that’s what truly interests me. As you suggest, the speech that remains raw.
Are you perhaps talking about a more instinctive system of understanding?
I don’t think I’d call it instinctive, but rather unconscious. But yes, I’m definitely proposing a less rationalist way of being in the world. A tolerance for that unknown part and for letting go of the need to (as we say in Spanish) “have the reason” (be right). What do reasons really matter, if they’re always fabricated anyway? That’s why I work the way I do, from uncertainty. The process sets the pace and the meaning, not the other way around.
There’s also something very “masculine” in reason; a certain system of understanding and decision‑making that organizes the social sphere and that often translates, in art, into more solid, monumental, stone‑like structures. In contrast, there’s been a great deal of critique—especially since the 1960s—by women artists who work with lighter, perishable, less “noble” materials. I don’t know if that’s something you consciously explore.
I think that’s right. But I would not call it masculine in a genital sense, rather as a psychic position. It’s more a structural issue, specific to the ideology we live in: the domination of a so-called “active” mode of thought over a “passive” one, when in fact the latter is much more important.
I certainly admire the panorama of artists you’re referring to (Eva Hesse, Lynda Benglis, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Aurèlia Muñoz…). It’s no coincidence that this “ignoble” production coincides with the years when feminist movements were in full swing, and in a society that had long been questioning its faith in technical progress and inherited institutions. During those years, many women also gained a degree of financial independence.
Perhaps for them, who must have felt their exclusion so closely, it was natural to work differently, ignoring what had traditionally been valued and adapting their work to their lives, tastes, cycles, and strengths; without subjecting themselves, so to speak, to the models they’d inherited. Why should they meet the demands of monumentality that belonged to ideologies that mistreated them…? I’m not saying that male art is by default monumental and historicist—that’s false and reductive—but I do want to underline the link between artistic legacy and ideology.
You’ve mentioned several times that you’ve lived abroad. How do you see the art scene in Spain compared to other countries, such as the United Kingdom or Belgium?
I think that, over the last forty or fifty years, the Iberian Peninsula has developed faster and with greater intensity than most of the traditional territories of the art industry. Those other places start from a huge, deeply rooted artistic fabric that is, above all, the result of an older commercial and political infrastructure. I am really optimistic about southern Europe; I believe in its strength and in its diverse sensibilities and social forms. I’ve come back to work from here because I see a humanised future taking shape as an alternative to other myths we’ve inherited.
Also, many of us move around frequently and are in contact with different contexts. Being based here doesn’t mean stopping working elsewhere. On the contrary, it’s likely that a base with a different character, with the stimulus of “things yet to be done,” which gives us so much strength, will allow us to move around more nimbly.
Yes, I feel that this also stands in contrast to a certain cultural homogenization on an international level, often linked to mass tourism and to economic dynamics driven by the global North.
What you’re saying is interesting. That cultural dominance is also marked by language. Each tongue produces its own way of relating, of organising the world, and of choosing its nuances. So if most critical thought is written in English, sensibility also gets reduced to that language.
We do not need to fully adapt. When we go to other contexts, it’s not only about absorbing, but also about contaminating. If we talk about language, we’re talking about structures.
Diversity, which is so beneficial, isn’t achieved only by broadening the range of content that’s presented, but above all by modifying the skeletons that hold it up. It’s up to us to intervene in the means of production, in the conditions and tempos of work; in how we distribute care, money, and knowledge.
To wrap up—sadly—any dreams or future plans?
To remain. Now that I’ve just opened a show I’ve had in mind for a long time, I’m happy to return to practice for practice’s sake. I feel like spending time like that, a bit more in secret.
Thank you for your interview. It’s been a pleasure!
[A visitor then approaches us, smiling, to congratulate Esther on the exhibition. She adds that it’s very beautiful to hear her speak with such enthusiasm about her work. “That’s what matters,” she says—“because what isn’t given is lost.”]
Interview by Victoria Álvarez Conde. 11.05.26
Images 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 courtesy of the artist. Tú, tú, tú, mi incesante, 2026, Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid. Photograph by Victor Hugo Marín Caballero.