Erika Verzutti — Mutations / Créations 3 — Centre Georges Pompidou — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 20 → April 15, 2019

An original installation designed by the artist occupies the whole area of the gallery space and combines bronze, ceramic, cement and papier mâché sculptures laid out in islands grouping ‘families’ of works together. ‘Tarsila’, a tribute to Brazilian surrealist artist Tarsila do Amaral; ‘Missionaries’; ‘Turtles’; the ‘Brasilia’ family, a reference to 1960’s Brazil, and ‘Cemeteries’, consisting of rejected and failed sculptures.

These ‘families’ have no real theme and follow a rule that is not clear. One work often leads to another and appearances can be deceptive; a banana cast becomes an insect, a kiss is shaped from a beetroot and celery, bronze becomes stone and papier mâché turns to rubber.

A monumental new work depicting a swan forms the base for the artist’s own sculptures, a sort of mother figure at the heart of this huge tribe. In a more intimate cabinet, Erika Verzutti presents relief murals in bronze or cement, often layered with paint.

The ‘Feminist’ dimension of Erika Verzutti’s sculpture constitutes a crucial element of her work, occasionally inverting genders and playing with the fascination for femininity and all its clichés: curvy buttocks, the reference to make-up and so-called ‘sexy’ clothing such as the bikini, or the profession of ‘call-girl’. Here, again, there is total freedom, provocative and full of playfulness and irony.

Verzutti’s work has been exhibited by several major international institutions, such as the 2017 Venice Bienniale, Viva Arte Viva, with a giant Turtle and ‘Animal Cemetery’; the São Paulo Bienniale (2016), the New York Sculpture Center (2015), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2014) and the Lyon Biennial (2012).