As a few giant galleries absorb ever more market share, thank the muses of art and commerce for Ramiken. The young dealer Mike Egan has piloted this enigmatic, protean gallery through a choppy decade for both art and real estate, and presented its ambitious exhibitions in a crumbling basement, an Upper East Side penthouse, a cave in Puerto Rico—and, now, a 17,000-square-foot warehouse floor in industrial Bushwick, Brooklyn, with a view of both refulgent skyscrapers and an infernal scrap-metal recycling plant.
Ramiken’s first Brooklyn show, Nobodies, goes to Andra Ursuţa, whose six remarkable glass sculptures, resting on cinder-block plinths, create an arresting tableau of sex, stress and self-portraiture. Each conjoins the artist’s face and body to heaped clothing, B.D.S.M. gear and drink bottles; faces melt into bags, heads balloon like the beast’s from “Alien.”
Although Ms. Ursuţa uses 3-D scanners to prepare molds, these works are traditionally cast glass sculptures—in marbled amber or Perrier green—which (thanks to the bottle spouts) also function as vessels. That makes them different, and more contemporary, than similar sculptures by Louise Bourgeois and Alina Szapocznikow, who also imagined bodies as permeable bundles of pell-mell parts. These freakish personages, cinched by corsets or stretched out like yogis, cannot escape today’s always-on performativity; even in your most unsound form, you must still work.
Other versions of some sculptures here appeared at this year’s largely blah Venice Biennale. But Ms. Ursuţa’s exquisitely awkward glass feels far more urgent here in Bushwick, with a view out the windows to both capital and oblivion.