Eva Fàbregas’ visceral sculptures are monstrous, and very moreish

Eva Fàbregas’ sculptures are alive. Well, they offer all the characteristics of being alive: bulbous, plumped-skinned volumes that almost pulsate with their pastel-hued, bowel-like bodies. 

‘Enredos: Eva Fàbregas’ marks the first chapter in Centro Botín’s new exhibition programme, which focuses on artists who have received the Fundación Botín Art Grant. The show offers a sensory, intuitive and aesthetic relationship between Fàbregas' work and pieces from the Fundación Botín’s art collection. The results are a seamless fusion of new, existing, and the space that surrounds both. 

‘I wanted to bring together a series of artworks that have a difficult, often unexpected, dialogue with each other that is not related to questions of influence, generation or canon. And this is how I began to envision the exhibition as a large-scale living organism that would follow its own libidinous logic, a desiring machine,’ says Fábregas, who was born in Barcelona and works in London.  

Fàbregas’ practice is unashamedly rooted in now, and all the chaos currently defining the era we’re muddling through. Her work is concerned with the ‘erotica of the consumer object and the mechanisms of desire’ (executed to jarring effect in the recent London Open 2022 exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, in which condom-like silicone translucent sculptures turned heads and some stomachs). Through sculpture, video, installation and sound, Fàbregas creates works that dissect the cacophony that is wellness culture, consumerism, and therapeutic subcultures found on social media.

Her sculptures leave viewers in a somatic quandary: are we looking at something grotesque or sumptuous, earthbound or extraterrestrial, naive or perverse, a source of nurture or menace – sex toys or actual toys? Rhythmic volumes inflated to the point of discomfort snake around the Centro Botín, burying all those presented with their sheer mass. When you’re in a space with Fàbregas’ works, gravity doesn’t equate to much. 

Nor does the art-world trope of ‘do not touch’. ‘In this exhibition at Centro Botín, we can gently lie down on the sculptures, embrace them, synchronise our breathing with their own, their skin as an extension of our own, in an act of communion as beautiful as it is strange,’ explained Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, director of exhibitions and the collection at Centro Botín. 

Viewers are first presented with a series of drawings by Fàbregas in acrylic that zooms in on elements of her installations. In the next space, a sculpture careers through the exhibition spaces, ignoring walls (and quite literally piercing through them) and all the conventions of exhibiting. After Fàbregas’ sculpture is a selection of works by artists represented in the Fundación’s collection who, like Fàbregas, have previously received the Fundación Botín Art Grant, including Leonor Antunes, Nora Aurrekoetxea, David Bestué, Cabello/Carceller, Asier Mendizabal and Sara Ramo.

The show leaves the most monumental until the last. An installation, co-produced with Centro Botín and MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, comprises an accumulation of colossal inflatable sculptures, resembling an organism spiralling like a virus in uncontrollable reproduction. It draws on the fantasy worlds of children's stories and sci-fi, seemingly narrating a scenario in which humans have shrunk, and entered a version of their own bodies.

‘Enredos: Eva Fàbregas’, 20 May – 15 October 2023, Centro Botín, Santander, Spain. centrobotin.org