DESTE Foundation, Hydra, Greece
June 24–October 31, 2025
The DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Apocalypse Now and Then, a solo exhibition by Romanian artist Andra Ursuţa. The show will be on view at the Foundation’s Project Space, a former slaughterhouse on the island of Hydra between June 24th and October 31st, 2025. This marks Ursuţa’s first major exhibition in Greece.
Ursuţa draws from the visual language and display strategies of archeological museums to invent faux-historicist artefacts belonging to a defunct civilization whose relics seem to speak to the anxieties of our present. Both familiar and absurd, the artist displays fragments of sculptures and studio detritus that have been successively built up and destroyed with analog and digital tools. These works explore the history of object-making and sculpture and the ways in which this manually-derived system of knowledge and speculation has come to shape our visual world. Apocalypse Now and Then plunges viewers into a truncated historiography where passingly familiar ancient tropes, grotesque votives, and scarred bronze figures hover between archaeology and fiction.
The exhibition introduces Desolation Ware, a new series of lost-wax cast bronze sculptures. Part inspired by decorative art objects and interior design, the forms are the distilled accessories of existential uncertainty: a monstrous platter of snakes issuing from a bicycle helmet to invoke a Gorgon; a zoomorphic jug that features landscape elements from a pre-Renaissance desert – the kind of place St Anthony might have been harassed by demons; a chair resembling an orthopaedic throne or the hug of an iron maiden; a conveyor of bodily fluids heralding organ failure. Doubling down on the cliche art medium of cast bronze with verdigris patination, Desolation Ware also engages with the misconceptions of art history, such as the false understanding of classical sculptures as originally white when, in reality, they were polychrome, and examines how these errors can become momentous, generative forces.
Learn more at DESTE Foundation.