Andra Ursuţa

Andra Ursuţa, born in 1979, is a Romanian-American artist who has lived and worked in New York since 2000. Ursuţa is known for her nihilistic portrayal of the human condition, confronting issues such as patriotism, violence against women, and the “expulsion of ethnic groups.” Mourning death and violence through irony and visual metaphors, Ursuţa’s work holds a mirror up to the darkness of our cultural reality. Ursuţa’s work is held in public collections worldwide.

Andra Ursuţa
Born	1979
Nationality	Romanian
Alma mater	Columbia University
Occupation	Artist

Early Life

Ursuţa was born in 1979 in Salonta, Romania, (Hungarian name Nagyszalonta) a town on the Romanian-Hungarian border, under the communist leadership of Nicolae Ceaușescu. She emigrated to the United States in 1997, and moved to New York in 1999. In 2002, Ursuţa received a BA in Art History and Visual Arts from Columbia University in New York City.

Career

Ursuţa’s works draw on her personal narrative, while simultaneously speaking to mutually defined cultural experiences. Ursuţa uses a variety of media, merging traditional sculpture with new technologies to transform common materials into visceral sculptures and installations.

Many of Ursuţa’s sculptures begin as assemblages of vessels, scrap materials, and renderings of the human body. Conceptually, Ursuţa’s sculptures contain a collection of cultural references ranging from rock-n-roll to health cults. Ursuţa has been named "a master of materials, craft, form, political commentary, recent history, magical insight and sculptural power" ” for her weaving of the visual and the conceptual.

Ursuţa has stated that she’s no crusader, and that “I’m just... reflecting unspoken attitudes that form the undercurrent of images and news stories, and the way contemporary experience is framed.”

In her Stoner (2013) installation, Ursuţa uses a fenced-off pitching machine that hurtles round rocks at a tiled wall containing strands of long, black hair (as if depicting that women are walled up inside) to explore themes of organized misogyny, jock culture, and competitive aggression.

In a 2012 New York Times review of Ursuţa's Magical Terrorism, the newspaper’s chief art critic Roberta Smith notes a relationship between Ursuţa’s personal experience and a wider generational experience. The sculptures contrast “systems of belief, economics and display, as well as different states of otherness. The disturbing impression is of time running backward, of civilization devolving.”

More recent shows by Ursuţa combine both cutting-edge and ancient processes in their construction. Ursuţa’s Nobodies (2019) - with its six glass sculptures – uses both 3-D printing and ancient lost-wax casting, contrasting free will and choice, life and death, and ambition and helplessness. As described in an essay by Chris Wiley, this work captures the human tendency to “strive and stretch and sweat our way towards a more perfect body, and a calmer, clearer mind, [although] the undertow of decay will always be too strong for us to fight." The sculptures, the delicacy of their material and the intimacy of their forms, offer a sobering truth that “our bodies and our histories will vanish, like raindrops in an ocean squall. All of this might be for nothing, all of us might be nobodies.” As Ursuţa defamiliarizes the bodily form, the remaining figures perhaps reveal "...our brains…locked in the prisons of our dying bodies."

Solo Exhibitions

Ursuţa’s first solo exhibition – Andra Ursuţa: The Management of Barbarism – was displayed in 2010 at Ramiken Crucible, NY. Since 2010, Ursuţa’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent venues internationally.

• 2012: Magical Terrorism, Ramiken, New York, NY
• 2014: Scytheseeing, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany
• 2014: Hammer Projects: Andra Ursuţa, Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, CA
• 2014: Fartchitectures, The Peep-Hole Art Center, Milan, Italy
• 2014-2015: As I Lay Drying, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL
• 2015: Whites, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland
• 2016: Andra Ursuţa: Alps, The New Museum, New York, NY
• 2018-2019: Andra Ursuţa: Vanilla Isis, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy
• 2019: Nobodies, Ramiken, New York, NY
• 2021: Void Fill, David Zwirner Gallery, Paris, France

Other Solo Shows

• 2010: Management of Barbarism, Ramiken Crucible, New York, NY
• 2011: Vandal Lust, Ramiken Crucible, New York, NY
• 2012: Storage Space, Ramiken Crucible, New York, NY
• 2012: Mothers, Let Your Daughters Out Into the Streets, Francois Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, CA,
• 2013: Solitary Fitness, Venus Over Manhattan, New York, NY,
• 2014: Tongue Mops and Bunny Pictures, Ramiken Crucible, New York, NY
• 2015: Ο Νότος θα εγερθεί ξανα, Ramiken Crucible, New York, NY,,
• 2015: Enslavables, Massimo DeCarlo, London, England
• 2017: The Man from the Internet, Massimo DeCarlo, Milan, Italy

Group exhibitions

Ursuţa’s work has also been included in several domestic and international group exhibitions:

• 2011: Ostalgia, New Museum, New York, NY
• 2013-2014: Busted, The High Line, New York, NY
• 2013: 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
• 2013: Expo 1: New York, MoMA PS1, New York, NY
• 2015: Artists and Poets, Secession, Vienna, Austria
• 2015-2016: 13th Lyon Biennale, Lyon, France
• 2016-2017: High Anxiety: New Acquisitions, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL
• 2017: 15th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey
• 2017-2018: The Trick Brain, Aïsh Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon
• 2019: 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
• 2019: The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
• 2020: 20/20, David Zwirner, New York, NY
• 2022: Vessels, David Zwirner, London, England
• 2022: 59th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy,

Ursuţa’s work is held in public collections worldwide, including the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and the Rubell Museum, Miami. Ursuţa has been featured in three Venice biennials, including her upcoming presentation in 2022. Ursuţa lives and works in New York.