FOR MUCH OF art history, figurative sculpture was steeped in a sense of the eternal. Ancient statues of leaders, heroes and gods tended to embody what their creators believed (or hoped) would endure forever. Now figurative sculpture reflects profound anxieties over permanence. Our bodies are bombarded by stuff — for example, the microplastic particles of broken-down goods that lodge in our testicles, guts and lungs — and our eyes by an onslaught of images. “When I think about all the garbage that is made and bought on Amazon every day, I find it absolutely terrifying and overwhelming,” said the Romanian-born artist Andra Ursuta, 45. “As someone who makes objects, I need to resolve that for myself, or whatever I make needs to engage with that.” Ursuta, who is based in London and New York, is known for unpredictable, darkly humorous work in which the body is usually a site of tragicomic degradation. In recent years, she has created monstrous cast-glass creatures that combine her own face, limbs and torso with cheap Halloween props, plastic bottles, bondage masks and other kinds of fetish gear. The detritus of overproduction that lingers on in landfills is part of us, her work suggests, an extension of our physical selves and a monument. Ursuta first exhibited the series in 2019 at the Venice Biennale, as she entered her 40s. “Your body starts to change, you become aware of all the indignities that are coming down the pike,” she said. “Some things are going to spill out or leak or droop despite your best efforts.” The sculptures, with titles like “Yoga Don’t Help,” distill the anxiety of inevitable bodily failure. In Venice, Ursuta poured a little alcohol inside the hollow works — a riposte to the cliché of female bodies as vessels. The booze, fittingly, ate through the adhesive inside the sculptures, threatening to dribble out.
The perils of self-presentation in an age of heightened exposure find keen expression in the seductive, disconcerting sculptures of the American artist Kayode Ojo, 34. To create “Ice Queen” (2020), Ojo sheathed two chairs with chrome-plated legs in matching white sequined dresses. The identical chairs face each other, the dresses linked at the wrists by chains of steel key rings emerging from the sleeves, as though two headless divas were holding hands — or as though a single woman were coldly regarding her own reflection. Swiss Army knives, blades out, dangle in place of fingers.
The various components of “Ice Queen” are balanced on vertical stacks of rectangular plastic boxes — Ojo never fastens, glues or screws together the elements in his sculptures. A sense of precarity haunts the work, “whether it’s economic precarity or social precarity,” said Ojo, who was born in Cookeville, Tenn., and currently lives in New York. “Anything could move at any point.”
Sculpture is audacious in its demands. Painting tends to hang politely on walls; sculpture takes up space. We take representations of the body personally and react with a curiosity, empathy or disgust rarely elicited by abstract cubes or hunks of metal. In our doubles, we recognize our own vulnerability or recall the intrinsic marvels of being inside breathing, sensing bodies in constant flux — works in progress shaped by labor, genes, vanity and, ultimately, time.
