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Andra Ursuţa: Whites

On view at Kunsthalle Basel Andra Ursuţa’s new sculptures: a family of smooth casings and clean modernist geometries that contrast with their gaping orifices and skeletal protrusions.

Andra Ursuta, <i>Whites</i>, view of the exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, 2015. Photo: Philipp Hänger Courtesy Andra Ursuta; Massimo de Carlo, Milan/London; Ramiken Crucible, New York

For “Whites”, her first solo presentation in Switzerland, Andra Ursuţa has developed a series of new sculptures that draw from a piece she first made in 2013 entitled Broken Obelisk.

That sculpture was based, as its title implies, on Barnett Newman’s eponymous monument, made over the years between 1963 and 1969, which is in turn a reference to the nineteenth century monument commemorating George Washington, the first U.S. president, which for its part was formally appropriated from the pyramidion-topped pillars that stand at the entrances to temples in ancient Egypt.

Each member of Ursuţa’s new family of figures is slightly different and has a vaguely anthropomorphic form, with eye sockets or nostrils cast from human skulls sunk into a smooth surface; sometimes they have rodents’ teeth or cast skeletal elements added to signal makeshift mouths or legs, turning any semblance of a commemorative monument into a deformed, seemingly hooded figure, almost Ku Klux Klan–ish in appearance. The sculptures’ smooth casings and clean modernist geometries contrast with their gaping orifices and skeletal protrusions, suggesting cool modernism infected with a macabre bodily abjection. Instead of pedestals, the figures rest on old kitchen chairs, secondhand office furnishings, modernist design classics, and cast transparent resin bases, some embedded with fake vegetable slices.