The work Números primos (2003-2023) by the artist Esther Ferrer (San Sebastián, 1937) is now definitively installed in the internal plaza of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country. Its new location will facilitate its use as a space for the meeting and participation of visitors, the realisation of artistic programmes linked to performative practices and the development of pedagogical proposals.

“After several years of working on projects with defined geometric structures in the 1970s, I felt the need to think about others in which my aesthetic preferences would play a secondary role. ‘Free’ structures capable of evolving by themselves, following their own internal logic. For some time I failed to achieve a satisfying result, until one night I dreamt of prime numbers. This was the beginning of the series Poema de los números primos (Poem of Prime Numbers). [...] The first thing that surprised me when I began to work with the prime numbers series was that the result is always balanced and beautiful whatever the system used; secondly, the larger the work, in other words, the more numbers it comprises, the more interesting and varied the structure, never symmetrical, always moving. That is why I considered creating monumental works from the outset, such as floors, murals, tapestries, etc. On entering the universe of prime numbers, one has the sensation that they are the translation, the reflection of a magnificent universal chaos, continually evolving, never repeating, always different and always the same. A chaos within which there seems to be an order, a strange, peculiar order.”

This work by Ferrer is based on the spiral figure of the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam (1909-1984)

The work is made up of 10,000 square ceramic stoneware slabs, with 3 types of pieces: 4,556 pieces with a red diagonal, 4,223 pieces with a blue diagonal and the remaining 1,221 with a printed prime number from 41 to 10,039, both included.

Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country Collection, Vitoria-Gasteiz. Vitoria-Gasteiz City Council long-term loan. Produced in collaboration with the Architecture Service of Alava Provincial Council