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 works that deal with primarily dark issues – sculptural work that draws on both personal experience and undercurrents in contemporary society, combining themes of misogyny, political radicalization, and pop culture. 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 brutal regime of Nicolae CeauSescu. 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 unique voice draws from memory, nostalgia, art history, and pop culture. Ursuţa uses a variety of media while merging traditional sculpture with new technologies to transform common objects and materials into viscerally evocative sculptures and installations that give new, redemptive form to subjective experience.

Many of Ursuţa’s works include a morbid, religious spin and references to the Black Standard of the Islamic State, in addition to combining diverse references from rock-n-roll, health cults, pop culture, and political radicalization, ultimately culminating in civilization devolving.” Ursuţa has stated that she’s no crusader, and that “I’m just kind of reflecting unspoken attitudes that form the undercurrent of images and news stories, and the way contemporary experience is framed.” Ursuţa has been referred to as “a master of materials, craft, form, political commentary, recent history, magical insight and sculptural power.”

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 “Magical Terrorism,” the newspaper’s chief art critic Roberta Smith states “This exhibition contrasts 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” (Nov. 14 - Dec. 21, 2019) - with its six glass sculptures – uses 3-D printing combined with ancient lost-wax casting, and focuses on contrasting free will and choice, life and death, ambition and helplessness and can be summed up in the quote “Though we strive and stretch and sweat our way towards a more perfect body, and a calmer, clearer mind, the undertow of decay will always be too strong for us to fight. 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.” Ursuţa notes about this installation “our brains are locked in the prisons of our dying bodies.”

Solo exhibitions

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

• 2012: Magical Terrorism, Ramiken, New York
• 2014: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany
• 2014: Hammer Museum, University of California
• 2014: The Peep-Hole Art Center, Milan
• 2014-2015: Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
• 2015: Kunstahalle Basel
• 2016: Andra Ursuţa: Alps, The New Museum, New York
• 2018-2019: Andra Ursuţa: Vanilla Isis, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy
• 2019: Nobodies, Ramiken, New York
• 2021: David Zwirner Gallery, Void Fill, Paris, France

Other Ramiken Shows

• 2010: Ramiken Crucible, "Management of Barbarism”
• 2011: Ramiken Crucible, "Vandal Lust”
• 2012: Ramiken Crucible, "Storage Space”
• 2012: Francois Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles "Mothers, Let Your Daughters Out Into the Streets” ,
• 2013: Venus Over Manhattan, "Solitary Fitness”,
• 2014: Ramiken Crucible, "Tounge Mops and Bunny Pictures”
• 2015: Ramiken Crucible, "Ο Νότος θα εγερθεί ξανα, R”,,
• 2015: Massimo De Carlo, London, "Enslavables”
• 2017: Massimo De Carlo, Milan, "The Man from the Internet”

Group exhibitions

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

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

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 lives and works in New York.