The medium of sculpture is more present than ever. It has been stretched, twisted, and performed, and thus fragmented into multiple facets. It has made the leap into installation, assemblage, bas-relief, collage and other forms of expressions alike. Unleashing the sins of sculpture brings together emerging and established artists in addressing the category of sculpture from the perspective of a more-than-expanded field. It unpacks sculpture as a living organism that morphs according to the artist’s subjectivity, but also to the external stimuli that informs the work of art.
This survey exhibition features nineteen contemporary Romanian female sculptors —Apparatus 22, Andreea Anghel, Alexandra Boaru, Alex Bodea, The Bureau of Melodramatic Research, Lorena Cocioni, Giulia Cretulescu, Arantxa Etcheverria, Andreea Medar, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Ioana Nemes, Ileana Pascalau, Pusha Petrov, Adriana Preda, Lea Rasovszky, Ioana Sisea, Larisa Sitar, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Kristin Wenzel— and showcases works created over the past decade along with newly commissioned pieces. Presented as an open-ended, non-linear narrative, the show blends the visions of these female artists in exploring ideas of pleasure, pain, memory, reflections on psychoanalysis and the female identity.
For centuries, sculpture in particular was perceived as a male-dominiated form of art since it required physical labour and strength. However, this did not stop female sculptors from creating groundbreaking works that have contributed to the history of art and deconstructed traditional views of art production by women, offering diverse perspectives across a wide range of cultures and expressions.
Welded metal, ceramic, wax trompe l'oeil bas-relief, twisted concrete sponge, a styrofoam haunted disco house, a sinless altar, Freud’s reinterpreted sofa, marble dices, a semantron-like mama, a magical totem to imperfect beauty, a bandoleer of lipsticks, a cohort of female mannequins, a liberated femme-fatale makeup table – this group exhibition sheds light on multiple perspectives of women in sculpture as an expanded field. Reversing the metaphor of the sins as an untouchable act attributed to female sculptors, this exhibition invites viewers into a magical universe of ruminations, desires, anxieties, and deconstructions of the archaic and canonical.
It is no coincidence that many of the works address the body as a ground of resistance, that is, the body and its powers – the power to act, to transform itself and the body as a limit to exploitation (Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin). As female bodies are seen as vessels for circulating knowledge, affective labor and struggles, this exhibition crafts the capacity of the imaginary to transcend the physical. In sculptural form, these works leave and simultaneously occupy the corporeal, merging their audience with their deep rhythms.
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