ektor garcia (b. 1985, Red Bluff, California, USA) is a multidisciplinary artist who approaches sculpture through wide-ranging experiments with craft techniques and materials. Using principles of assemblage and social sculpture, he develops a lexicon of crochet, weaving and fibre-work, including the use of ceramic, metal, leatherwork and found materials.

garcia received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014, and his MFA from Columbia University, New York in 2016. Recent institutional exhibitions include the San Jose Museum of Art, Dwelling, Cantor Arts Center, Palo Alto, CA, 2024; Even Better than the Real Thing, Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, 2024; La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio, and Prospect 5, New Orleans, 2021; and Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, 2019. His work has been widely exhibited in galleries internationally, including Rebecca Camacho Presents (San Francisco), Mendes Wood (Sao Paulo), James Fuentes (New York City) and kurimanzutto (Mexico City). garcia was selected as Artist in Residence at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA in 2022 and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2021. The artist lives and works nomadically.

ektor garcia: Text by Rafa Barber Cortell, Visiting Curator, Launch Pad LaB, Spring 2025.

During my visit to Launch Pad LaB, I stepped into three very different studio environments, each shaped by a distinct artistic language, yet all quietly resonating with a shared attention to what is absent, intangible, or just out of reach. In the work of Florence Peake, Ana Gzirishvili, and ektor garcía, absence takes on a material presence — not as a void to be filled, but as something that leaves a mark, a trace. Whether through gestures of mourning, acts of transformation, or intimate forms of making, each artist finds ways to work with what cannot be fully grasped. Materials such as plaster, leather, and thread become vessels for memory — carriers of what’s missing, what’s felt, what resists being named.

ektor garcía’s work extends far beyond the walls of his studio. When I arrived to visit him, what struck me first was the sheer volume of pieces he had produced — and was still producing — with quiet, constant dedication. For ektor, making isn’t just part of the process: it is the process. He weaves, shapes, experiments with textiles and ceramics, allowing the act of doing to guide him — not overly concerned with the final result, but trusting that meaning will emerge through the gesture itself.

There’s a quiet intimacy to his practice. It feels as though you’re witnessing something created in solitude, but always with the other in mind — a subtle form of communication passed on without words. Rather than engaging with the dominant languages of contemporary art, ektor works with the vernacular, with craft, building a softer, more personal dialogue that connects through small things, through what’s learned at home. His crochet pieces, made with fine copper and silver wire, speak of knowledge passed down orally — of things made in childhood, behind closed doors, in private.

At one point, ektor told me how his grandmother used to crochet in exchange for bread. But his work isn’t about labour or hardship. It’s about forms of knowing, about an economy of care — where work is not just a means of survival, but a gesture, a memory, an act of tenderness. It is also an offering — something given freely, not in expectation of return, but as a way of making presence felt, of building connection and community.

In this way, his work challenges the hierarchies of gendered and racialised labour, blending a queer punk sensibility with the handcraft traditions of Mexico, his ancestral home.

His pieces — whether in textile, ceramic or metal, often incorporating found materials — are hybrid in nature: at once solid and fragile, dense and porous, sharp and tender. They evoke the body and its labour as a site of both pleasure and pain, rupture and repair. Many are made and unmade. The act of untying knots is just as important as retying them — a kind of ritual undoing, always searching for new forms of connection, new possibilities.

Beyond the studio, ektor had installed his work in the garden surrounding an old dovecote at Launchpad. There, his crochet pieces merged with nature, gently brushing up against it without disturbing it. Porcelain knots stretched across the space, breaking down the act of weaving to its most minimal expression, revealing the sculptural gesture that lives within the domestic — and giving it the space and attention it deserves. Like a quiet offering to the landscape itself, the works settled into their surroundings with gentle presence, sharing the space without imposing upon it.