Ballester, Gerard
Sabadell, 1990
Scholarship holder at tallerBDN from July to December 2011 and resident between January and April 2012
In 2009 he starts his studies at the Escola Massana which is Barcelona’s municipal Art and Design centre, specialising in Applied Sculptural Arts. He was awarded the Artistic Drawing Scholarship from the Escola Massana (the Art society called Círculo Artístico de Sant Lluc, Barcelona) and he also did the Wood Carving Course at the tallerBDN. He helped to set up and organise the exhibition of the artist Ana María Maiolino, (Antoni Tàpies Foundation, Barcelona). He put on the exhibition titled Orígenes (Origins) at Sala Busquets (Barcelona, 2009).
His own interests and styles begin as soon as he starts studying and they get stronger and flourish during his years at the school: he works on style and the nature of shape, the movement between extreme polarities on all levels, material, formal or conceptual, the immensity of the incomprehensible, the unknown and nature. Part of a praxis based on the substratum of art and origin that prolongs the urge to go far beyond appearances.
Inabitata Piaggia. The sculptural project that he is currently working on is based on the concept of the sublime and nature, generated by a powerful force that overcomes the subject, collapsing mind and reason beyond repair, into the object that absorbs them, thus perpetuating the soul in a certain state of horror, forcing it to go over its limits, breaking the surface.
