Excavations of the future apocalypse

Romanian artist Andra Ursota’s new show At the David Zwirner Gallery, “Retina Turner” consists of 16 large oval panels of cast glass. Private dancers. Each contains a half-finished spectral figure that appears to be partially submerged beneath the surface of the statue: a skeletal hand, a spine, and other remains. They’re like the fossils of an alien species, artifacts from a civilization that died mid-sentence in the middle of a volcanic catastrophe. It represents a dual exposure of loss and endurance, strange archeology and cold prophecy.

The different strains of Ursutas’ work are unmistakable. She took the oval shape from Lucio Fontana’s egg-shaped paintings, and like Fontana she shares the desire to transform the oval into a portal, a cosmic rift—but while Fontana pointed toward infinity, Ursota seems mired in historical weariness. Like HR Giger, Ursuśa designs an anti-heroic vocabulary in which ornamentation acts as a wound and polished surfaces feel pathological. As with Matthew Barney, I treated myth as theater, each being a prop in a play without a text. Like her Zwirner colleague Huma Bhabha, she constructs monumental figures out of rubble and waste – massive but grotesque and vivid. The difference is that Ursua’s panels insist on fragility. Glass may break.

Massimiliano Gioni of the New Museum pointedly writes that Ursua offers “a layering of references to the past and the future.” Her art predicts the future archaeology of antiquities. Each slab functions as a sedimentary layer of personal grief, the remains of vast killing fields. Past and future collapse into each other, leaving us standing on shifting ground.

In some cases, Ursuśa combined glass tubes and cut them into irregular patterned surfaces. The bioluminescent color is embedded in the material rather than applied. The results look extraterrestrial and natural, like giant germs. The bases are concrete, and each structure also contains metal hardware that holds the work in place like an ancient bug. These civic foundations bear the architecture of socialist memorials and New York’s sidewalks, evoking the city square, the cemetery, utopia, and the capital.

“A disaster is an ongoing process, not just a specific event,” Ursota said. Breakdown for her is a permanent state, which is what she is trying to evoke, not any narrative. “We can never fully understand the context in which something is made,” she said. “We’re all making things up and trying to build a story around it.”

However, despite the show’s muscularity, it did not create a noticeably big buzz. Perhaps space is partly to blame: in Zwirner’s antiseptic galleries, “Retina Turner” seems buried in its grandeur—a kind of crystalline Valhalla, polished, mournful, and static. Everything here is enclosed, self-contained, almost mummified. (As it happens, Ursuśa has another show at Dakis Joannou’s Slaughterhouse Institute on the Greek island of Hydra, where her primitive pieces feel right at home among the sea, stone, and sun.)

What stays with me about Ursota’s presentation is her refusal to triumph. The presentation feels almost too much – one object follows another until we’re almost exhausted. However, each reveals a damaged self in oblique fragments, a dramatic depiction of vulnerability. Ursuśa insists on form even when form is broken. Business does not herald the myth. They watch the legend unravel. Each of these memorial sculptures reminds us that art can record loss without longing, and grief without despair.