ERIKA VERZUTTI

Tactile in its approach, Erika Verzutti’s practice rests between sculpture and painting, drawing on a wide range of references from nature to popular culture. Shapes derived from fruits or vegetables recur alongside familiar objects, self-referential gestures, and images culled from social media to form a new vernacular. Firmly rooted in studio practice, Verzutti’s work revels in its process and explores how disparate ideas and perceptions take on a physical form.

A series of works that reference the totemic form of the Venus of Willendorf occupy the floor of the gallery. Varying in scale and executed in bronze and papier mâché, Verzutti’s Venuses are comprised of fruits, both moulded from the actual object and shaped by hand from memory. Precariously stacked, each work, in turn, performs a form of ‘Venus Yoga’, standing upside down to support their own weight. For this exhibition, Verzutti has broadened the works’ original referent allowing for new configurations that are more bulbous, and less organised, and benefit from the Venus’ innumerable iterations throughout history.

This free, and playful engagement with art history permeates Verzutti’s work and continues in a new series of variegated papier mâché works dripped and splattered with paint in a manner reminiscent of Jackson Pollock, simultaneously pre-meditated and accidental. Verzutti applies extruded forms, which she refers to as churros, onto the surface arranged in varying configurations to suggest landscapes and changing weather cycles that are further conjured by the works’ individual titles: Churros and wind, Umbrellas in Chaos, Churros and turbulence, among others. This fluidity between abstraction and figuration is also embraced in wall-based bronzes, which are driven by the process of their making, exhibiting the unaltered vestiges of Verzutti’s own hands and fingers. These immediate marks and decisions are used as both a guide and a challenge for the completion of the work, as paint is applied in methods that waver between gestural, illustrative, and suggestive. Seen together, Verzutti’s work looks to conflate personal history with shared, universal experiences, and explore how material can continuously be recombined, reused, and reconfigured to forge new outcomes and ideas.

Erika Verzutti lives and works in Brussels and São Paulo. In 2021, MASP, Sao Paulo, presented the most extensive survey of Verzutti’s practice to date, titled The Indiscipline of Sculpture. Other past solo exhibitions include Nottingham Contemporary, 2021, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2019, Venus Yogini, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, 2019, Swan, Cucumber, Dinosaur, Pivô, São Paulo, 2016, Swan with Stage, Sculpture Center, New York, 2015, and Mineral, Tang Museum, Saratoga, 2014. Erika Verzutti’s work is currently included in the 3rd Geneva Biennale—Sculpture Garden, on view through September 30, 2022. Verzutti has additionally participated in numerous major exhibitions, including the 2019 Bienal de Arte Contemporanea de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal, the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017, 32ª Bienal de São Paulo, 2016, 2013 Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, 2013, among others. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Tate Modern, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo and Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, among others.