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Esther Gatón 
Bitter Cornices

11 October - 11 November 2025
Opening: Saturday 11 October, 5.30-8.30 pm

 

Partial Versions is delighted to present the first solo exhibition in the UK by Madrid and London based artist Esther Gatón. Spanning sculpture, video and painting, Gatón's practice is concerned with states of ambiguity and intensity, particularly their material, spatial, and socio-political effects. Working with intuitive processes and unexpected materials (such as bioplastics, phosphorescent paint, and doll clay), the artist utilises artifice and ornamentation, often alongside spatial intervention, to construct unsettled objects and environments.  Previous works take ordinary yet destabilising experiences like watching a horror film, riding a rollercoaster, or falling in love as starting points for exploring political, religious, and material histories in contemporary Spain.

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For Partial Versions, Gatón turns her attention to the conventions of domestic space, focusing on bookshelves, cupboards, and skirting boards across the ground floor of the building. Discrete interventions shift and disrupt protocols of display, concealment and maintenance throughout the space implicating the artist, residents, and visitors in a series of architectural and social transgressions.  
 

Plastic sheets suspended from floor to ceiling alter three alcoves in the living and dining rooms. These spaces, an architectural biproduct of the need for fireplaces in each room before the advent of central heating, have gradually become sought after, decorative details in most modern homes. Gatón has concealed them in favour of the illusion of a continuous, blank wall.  Books, lamps and ornaments, housed on retrofitted shelves in the alcoves and often displayed to express the identity, taste or status of the resident become partially hidden. The other walls of the space have similarly had any decoration, such as wall-based artworks, removed and holes or cracks have been filled. 
 

Running throughout is They ring true (2025), layers of phosphorescent paint added to the skirting boards. A typically overlooked architectural feature, here they are transformed into a surface that emits a gentle and peculiar glow, making its presence known depending on the time of day. Cardboard has been used in place of painting directly on to the boards themselves, a renter friendly gesture that speaks to a common yet uneasy relationship between the house, its inhabitants, and its decoration. 

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The original Victorian fitted cupboards are left ajar, emitting an unexpected but enticing glow of their own. One of the doors blocks the route and view through to the back of the house, forcing visitors to contort through a small gap to access the next room. Within each cupboard, Gatón has fixed works from a series of paintings, each created over several months as a daily, additive practice that takes place at her home in Madrid. Illuminated by spotlights, their presence and status as artworks draws visitors into the hidden recesses of the home. Revealing mismatched crockery, cleaning supplies and other paraphernalia one prefers to keep out of sight, the gaze of the visitor is a welcomed but uncomfortable act of trespass. 
 

​A new publication accompanies the exhibition featuring writing by Gatón and the exhibitions curator Amy Jones, alongside Oliviero Girondo's poem Flight Without Shores and installation views. The Spanish version was translated by Esther Gatòn. Pick up a free copy at Partial versions or click below for the PDF: 

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Spanish version 

English version 

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Biography

Esther Gatón lives and works in Madrid and London. Recent exhibitions include: Affiliate, WIELS, Brussels (2025), Tetillas, Pauline Perplexe, Paris (2024); Asleep on a feather bed with black curtains around him, an inverted torch (the earth was full of poppies), C3A, Córdoba; Emil Lime, CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid (both 2023); —White, The Mud. Softest Sun Machine, Raccoon, Barcelona (2022); Le Club du Poison-Lune, CAPC, Bordeaux; Eu Tinha poucos anos e já era rigorosamente ancià, Verao, Lisbon (both 2021). 

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Gatón’s writing has been published in Materiales Concretos, Nero, A*Desk, editorial concreta and Urbanomic. In 2022 she was in residence at WIELS, Brussels. That same year, she founded abierto, a non-profit project for small poetry encounters, based in South East London.​​

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Commissioned by Partial Versions. Supported by the Embassy of Spain in the United Kingdom

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