Artist: Andra Ursuța
Title: Apocalypse Now and Then
Venue: DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra
Photos: Dario Lasagni,
Courtesy the artist; David Zwirner; Ramiken
The DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Apocalypse Now and Then, a solo exhibition by Romanian artist Andra Ursuţa.
Ursuţa draws from the visual language and display strategies of archeological museums to invent faux-historicist artefacts belonging to a defunct civilization whose relics seem to speak to the anxieties of our present. Both familiar and absurd, the artist displays fragments of sculptures and studio detritus that have been successively built up and destroyed with analog and digital tools. These works explore the history of object-making and sculpture and the ways in which this manually-derived system of knowledge and speculation has come to shape our visual world. Apocalypse Now and Then plunges viewers into a truncated historiography where passingly familiar ancient tropes, grotesque votives, and scarred bronze figures hover between archaeology and fiction.
The exhibition introduces Desolation Ware, a new series of lost-wax cast bronze sculptures. Part inspired by decorative art objects and interior design, the forms are the distilled accessories of existential uncertainty: a monstrous platter of snakes issuing from a bicycle helmet to invoke a Gorgon; a zoomorphic jug that features landscape elements from a pre-Renaissance desert – the kind of place St Anthony might have been harassed by demons; a chair resembling an orthopaedic throne or the hug of an iron maiden; a conveyor of bodily fluids heralding organ failure. Doubling down on the cliche art medium of cast bronze with verdigris patination, Desolation Ware also engages with the misconceptions of art history, such as the false understanding of classical sculptures as originally white when, in reality, they were polychrome, and examines how these errors can become momentous, generative forces.
Installed both inside and outside the Slaughterhouse, the show transforms the space into a notional museum. The DESTE Foundation’s Slaughterhouse—a former abattoir perched above the sea—becomes a stage for Ursuţa’s monumental yet spectral figures. Apocalypse Now and Then is not about a single moment of collapse but about the recursive fantasy of endings—the ancient world looking toward the abyss, and our own time mythologizing ruins that never were.
This exhibition continues the DESTE Foundation’s tradition of commissioning bold, site-specific installations that reimagine the boundaries of contemporary art.
