ERIKA VERZUTTI
Erika Verzutti (1971) is a Brazilian sculptor who lives and works between São Paulo and Europe. Verzutti was in residency at LUMA Arles from May through July 2024.
The residency provides a platform for Verzutti to produce a significant body of new work, present an exhibition, entitled The Life of Sculptures, and develop an ongoing film project that will be shot in Arles. Verzutti’s multifarious practice as a sculptor encompasses organic, human, and animal forms, references to Modern and Modernist art, citations of Brazilian art and architecture, and a playful suggestiveness bordering on eroticism. Often cast in bronze or concrete, the sculptures (and three-dimensional “wall works”) retain a light touch and colorful palette with forms that conjure associations of fruits, bodies, landscapes, and art history. For The Life of Sculptures, Verzutti has taken her signature vertical forms (they suggest the Endless Column of Constantin Brancusi with a tropical touch) and literally lays them down resting upon resin encased newspapers. This setting of sculptural repose or sheer exhaustion is situated among a number of bronze reliefs. These often share motifs such as body parts, orbs, or eggs, and traces of the artist’s hand or sculptural tools, creating a surreal and anthropomorphic dreamscape around the resting sculptures. The exhibition also suggests a studio space (the artist will also bring in clay models of work in progress), one in which the artist can absorb what has been made and what may come next. Also included are a series of clay models, rejects that lie in a “sculptural cemetery”, completing Verzutti’s life cycle of sculptures.