Andra Ursuţa’s studio is sandwiched between a 3D-printing startup and a parking garage for New York City garbage trucks, making for a distinct set of smells wafting in and out. It’s an oddly fitting spot for the Romanian-born sculptor, whose work merges surreal techno-realities with the grotesquerie of everyday life. Indeed, both neighbors played a part in Ursuţa’s newest body of work: a series of human-sized, semi-translucent vessels, which she considers self-portraits. Each is a kind of Frankensteinian monster—an amalgam of garbage and appendages from the artist’s own body which she 3D-scanned and cast into glass through a laborious process that mixes centuries-old techniques with of-the-moment technology. One of them, a reclining figure, has a bottle for an arm and feet that are made from the head of the titular creature from the 1987 movie Predator. Another positions a likeness of the artist’s own head—wearing a mask from Alien—atop what looks like the base of a blender. The works made their debut earlier this year at the Venice Biennale, where Ursuţa was included in Ralph Rugoff’s May You Live in Interesting Times exhibition. Now they’re on view as part of her show Nobodies at Ramiken gallery in Brooklyn, through December 21. (While the gallery is being renovated, Ursuţa’s show actually appears in a vacant raw space on a floor above.) On a recent afternoon, Artnet News visited Ursuţa’s studio in Brooklyn to see her new works and talk about how she made them.
The setting for Nobodies, essentially a construction site, is non-traditional to say the least. But it also feels right for that reason. I think that this particular situation is kind of perfect. It’s even better than Venice. It’s a very big, empty space. It’s so big that it almost feels like you’re outdoors, kind of like being in a park. So the works are bottles, but they’re also like statues and that’s more obvious this time around. And the show is on a construction site. To get to this building, you have to cross these train tracks. Across the street, there is a demolition site where they grind down construction materials day and night. So all the garbage we’re producing is being ground to dust directly across the street from the show—I couldn’t have wished for something better, honestly.
I’m interested in how these rather ad-hoc assemblages of found items are transformed into your pristine glass sculptures. What does the process behind these sculptures entail? They started out with trash that I had around the studio and old clothes of mine, or even, in some cases, fragments of props that I used in older works that I recycled. Then I filled them out with different kinds of foam and scanned them with a 3D-scanning program. I also scanned my body and face and with the 3D-modeling program we created this new hybrid between the scans of the physical sculptures and just the body as it is. So it’s kind of like drawing from nature. Once the form is finished in the program, we cut it into multiple pieces so that we could cast it in glass. Those pieces were then printed in nylon, and we made a mold of each part. We had to make waxes for each piece and then they were cast in glass. It’s a very old school process that’s similar to the lost wax casting technique—a very traditional way of making sculptures. So the work goes from being detritus to being very synthetic. It’s like going from analogue to digital back to analogue. It’s a process that confuses the moment in technology that created it, fusing both new and old techniques.