Erika Verzutti, Churros and Rain (Installation View), via Andrew Kreps
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. For her most recent exhibition at Andrew Kreps in New York, the artist continues that mode over a range of materials and approaches.
Erika Verzutti, Churros and Rain (Installation View), via Andrew Kreps
A series of works that reference the totemic form of the Venus of Willendorf occupy the gallery floor. Varying in scale and executed in bronze and papier mâché, Verzutti’s Venuses are comprised of fruits, both molded from the actual object and shaped by hand from memory. Precariously stacked, each work in turn performs a “ headstand “ pose, positioned to support their own weight. For this exhibition, Verzutti has created new configurations whose bulbous forms are further emphasized through a contoured application of paint.
Erika Verzutti, Churros and Rain (Installation View), via Andrew Kreps
This free, and playful engagement with art history permeates Verzutti’s work and continues in a new series of 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 hanging weather cycles, and flows of water or air, which are further conjured by the works’ individual titles: Churros with wind, Umbrellas and Chaos, Churros Turbulence, among others.
Erika Verzutti, Churros and Rain (Installation View), via Andrew Kreps
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.
The show is on view through October 29th.
– C. Reinhardt
Read more:
Erika Verzutti at Andrew Kreps [Exhibition Site]
