Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
March–May 2014
Andra Ursuta makes work fueled by her memories and fears. Her sculptures and installations are often wry, poignant, self-deprecating, melancholic, nostalgic and apocalyptic. She mixes media such as cement, plaster, marble, found objects and wood to develop new ways of viewing the world and processing her memories and fears. Her latest body of work grew out of her fear of death, which fuels her obsession with the subject. She avoids cemeteries but makes imaginary visits to graveyards as a cathartic exercise. For the Frieze Art Fair Projects in 2012, she made a graveyard with marble tombstones featuring abstract, generic shapes. Her cemetery for this show is even more abstract: the vault gallery will be transformed into a shadow graveyard populated with sculptures that are casts of the shadows of tombstones. In Ursuta’s deft hands, we are left to wander a shadow cemetery, empty of souls, yet full of memories.
Learn more at the Hammer Museum.