Patricia Esquivias was born in Caracas and grew up in Madrid, currently lives in Mexico. She studied art in London and San Francisco. In Madrid she was in charge of a four years long exhibition program Los29enchufes with Manuela Moscoso. She works with video since 2005 and has exhibited her works in Madrid (Nacional Reina Sofia Museum, Gallery Maisterravalbuena), Germany (Frankfurter Kunstverein, 5th Berlin Biennale), New York (White Columns, Murray Guy), Italy (Arcos Museum, Artissima) and England (East International, Royal College of Art).
Patricia Esquivias is a storyteller. Her artistic practice shapes a clear, yet intensive and thematically complex oeuvre of text-based film works. Video, according to Esquivias, is the only medium capable of adequately satisfying and translating her artistic utterances. Self-critically she describes her methods of work as slow. Yet it is precisely the deliberateness of her approach (its striking slowness) and its conceptual precision that construct the complexity of her work. It is always she as an artist, who presents her texts—highly researched and reduced to essentials—in a natural, unpretentious manner, contrasting and supplementing them with image material drawn from the Internet, books, and her own personal archive. Thematic and conceptual perfection is subordinated to the camera work that, while intuitive and improvisational, never loses sight of its goal. Ostensibly banal details open a path in Esquivias’s film works to more abstract themes.
