Eva Fàbregas (born in 1988 in Barcelona, where she lives and works) is an artist who explores the relationship between body, matter, and environment through sculptural installations of strong sensory impact. Her practice unfolds in a liminal space between the natural and the artificial, the organic and the synthetic, investigating how substances transform, grow, and interact with the spaces that host them. Her works evoke living organisms, soft tissues, pulsating surfaces, and biomorphic structures that seem to breathe, expand, or mutate under the viewer’s gaze.
In her ongoing project Exudates, Fàbregas creates site-specific installations that bring heterogeneous materials—such as latex, elastic fabrics, nets, plastics, and translucent membranes—into dialogue with their surroundings. The artist has conceived an intervention for the exhibition Chi esce entra. A Tribute Exhibition to a Disappearing Building, hosted in the building at Via Gregoriana 9 in Rome, an extension of the Hertziana Library – Max Planck Institute for Art History. The works on display celebrate the building’s original function, inaugurated in 1911 as the private gallery of collector Ludovico Spiridon and later abandoned.
Here, Fàbregas presents a sculpture composed of inflatable spheres spilling from the wall like a cascade—a flow of matter that seems to emerge directly from the architecture itself. The title Exudates refers to the scientific term used to describe the secretions of wounded or infected tissues: a reference that gives the work an ambiguous and unsettling dimension, oscillating between attraction and repulsion.
The image evoked is that of a vital yet pathological fluid seeping from the building, as if the space itself were a living body, traversed by organic processes. The reddish color and rough texture of the sculpture recall the idea of an ongoing infection—an organism in transformation, where bacteria proliferate and expand as in the natural cycles of decay and renewal.
The installation enters into dialogue with the aesthetics of abandonment characterizing the surrounding space: an environment that seems to have absorbed mold, moisture, and traces of microscopic life, becoming fertile ground for new forms of existence. In this way, Fàbregas stages a natural process that animates and sets in motion elements that are, by definition, inorganic—reflecting on their plasticity and material presence.
Eva Fàbregas, Exudates,2024–ongoing.
Exhibition view, Chi esce entra, Via Gregoriana 9, Roma, 2025.
Credits: Enrico Fontolan, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History.
18/10/25
