Empty and Full
Andra Ursuta, whose works were shown at the last Venice Biennale in 2019, and at the New Museum in New York in 2016, will be exhibited for the first time at David Zwirner’s gallery (March 31st— May 15th, 2021), not in Chelsea, but in his Parisian gallery on Rue Vieille du Temple. It is notably Pliny the Elder who, in his Natural History, relates this founding anecdote. Zeuxis, approached by a delegation from the city of Crotone, was commissioned to make a painting showing Helen of Troy for the temple of Hera Lacinia. Not finding a model whose beauty would be comparable to that of the legendary Trojan by adoption, he asked the inhabitants of Crotone to bring him the five most beautiful maidens in the city. He copied from each of them what was most beautiful, and thus composed his Helen from the most remarkable “pieces” there were.
Apart from one detail, and not the least, which is beauty, this anecdote about Zeuxis is comparable to the story of the Golem in the Jewish tradition of Central Europe. It is similarly a question of assembling a body,
using clay, like the pieces of corpses for Frankenstein’s monster, whose story is said to be inspired by the Jewish Kabbalah. Born in Romania in 1979, but living in the United States since 1997, Andra Ursuţa showed her sculptures at the Venice Biennale organised in 2019 by Ralph Rugoff. Her works partly borrow their forms from fantasy cinema, though less from Frankenstein than from Alien and Predator, from which she uses fragments of extra-terrestrial creatures (head with elongated skull from Alien, hair that becomes an extension of the feet from Predator).
Her exhibition at the Galerie Zwirner in Paris is entitled Void Fill, a title with a very abstract expressionist ring to it, very “Newmanian” and very New York, the city where Ursuţa has lived since 1999. This exhibition in Paris is her first chez Zwirner. She particularly wanted to measure herself against this emblematic, historic space where the works of Raymond Pettibon, Dan Flavin and Oscar Murillo have followed one another over the last few months and which, as we know, belonged to Yvon Lambert. Ten sculptures are thus installed in the large room, following in the footsteps of the glass sculptures exhibited in Venice.
These works combine old and new technologies. Basically, sand casting meets 3D scanning like the umbrella the sewing machine on the dissecting table. The artist uses found objects as well as sculpted elements, which she combines to create assemblages, which are then 3D scanned. She sometimes intervenes again on the scan to introduce formal modifications. Then everything is 3D
printed, and a ceramic mould created from the form obtained. Finally, the sculpture is cast in glass in the mould.
In these sculptures, old clothes, objects abandoned in the street, masks of film creatures, fragments of the artist’s body or even adult toys collide. Succubustin’ Loose (2020) thus mixes oversized lace-up boots and a suffocation suit, used in BDSM, of which the breathing valve has been digitally modified into a bottle neck. For we have to keep in mind that these works are hollow, and that the artist considers them as containers, bottles. In Venice, they were half-filled with spirits. “The glass is half empty rather than half full. That kind of thing. When I put liquid in them, they were never full. It was just a little bit at the bottom. It suggests this idea that you’re late to the party in a sense. The best stuff has happened already”, Ursuţa tells us. Which reminds us of the first song of The Divine Comedy, as Dante, lost in a dark forest, walks “halfway along our life’s path”.
MAGICAL TERRORISM
The fact that these works have a function, in this case bottles, is a recurring theme in Ursuţa’s work. In an interview with Maurizio Cattelan she explains that at a time when she was interested in pornography, she made chairs from casts of her own behind. “The thinking was that if a piece would fail as sculpture, it could still make a useful chair,” (1) she says.
She also considers these glass sculptures to be self-portraits, probably because the formation of a personality consists precisely of a patchwork of experiences. And there is also something African about the way the artist transforms scraps. In fact, her sculptures sometimes evoke pagan idols, in particular the boliw, concretions of dried blood and earth, incorporating various things (sometimes foetuses) that feature in the voodoo cult, mainly in Mali, objects charged with magical powers. Ursuta’s solo exhibition at the Ramiken Crucible gallery (2012, New York) was entitled Magical Terrorism.
In any case, these sculptures create a disturbance in the terrain of their materiality. A hiatus emerges between their apparent solidity as archaic totems and the fragility of the glass. The tension of the air in the inflatable outfit is also palpable, like a discreet breath, in the thinness of the glass.
In the second room of the gallery it is twodimensional works that are displayed.These are photograms printed on velvet, the surface of which the artist coats with a light-sensitive product. She constructs a sort of darkroom in her studio and then affixes to the fabric objects that haunt the premises, before exposing the whole thing to light. Hence this skeletal hand, as if subjected to X-rays, which seems to brandish an incandescent parasol. The luminous motifs emanating from it recall the neo-gothic style of Northern California, the way light falls in the modern cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco, and the mysticism of the Dynaton pictorial movement, headed by the painter Lee Mullican. At any rate, these works, because they involve everyday objects and objects picked up in the vicinity of the studio, appear to be a logical continuation of the glass sculptures.
(1) Interview with Maurizio Cattelan, «The Forensic Evidence of Failure », Flash Art, May-June 2013.
Andra Ursuta
Née en / born 1979 à / in Salonta, Roumanie
Vit et travaille à / lives and works à / in New York Expositions personnelles / Solo exhibitions:
2021 David Zwirner, Paris
2019 Ramiken Crucible, New York
2018 Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin 2017 Massimo De Carlo, Milan
2016 New Museum, New York
2015 Massimo De Carlo, London ; Ramiken Crucible, New York ; Kunsthalle Basel