{"id":211898,"date":"2025-10-14T08:31:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T08:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/211898\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T08:31:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T08:31:09","slug":"it-was-a-revelation-i-was-going-to-become-a-fruit-sculptor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/211898\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It was a revelation \u2014 I was going to become a fruit sculptor!\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oversized fruits can be found everywhere in Erika Verzutti\u2019s downtown S\u00e3o Paulo studio. Rendered in clay, bronze, concrete and papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9, the sculptures \u2014 finished and work-in-progress \u2014 sit on the workbench and floor.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For two decades the Brazilian artist has made works that are globular, totemic and delight in quoting art history. These sculptures, often casts of bananas, gourds and melons, are also suggestively anthropomorphic.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t cook so much, but there was a moment around 2007 I felt this free association of various things that were on the kitchen table,\u201d the 54-year-old artist says, pouring coffee. \u201cIt felt like their imperfect forms might provide a new geometry that I could use. When this happened, it was a revelation, a form of salvation. I was going to become a fruit sculptor! This would be my thing that I could use forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sculptures have their own lives when they leave the studio, in museums, houses, bedrooms. It\u2019s like seeing your baby out in the world <\/p>\n

Erika Verzutti<\/p>\n

If there is a touch of absurdity to this, then it\u2019s one Verzutti leans into. In a 2011 show at her Brazilian gallery Fortes Vila\u00e7a she debuted this new turn with a series of sculptures in which bronze gourds leered suggestively at\u00a0partnering blocks of concrete. A cast of a jackfruit stood on a plinth with a hole bored into its spiky skin and a totem of two dozen star fruit fused together reached up to the ceiling.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ErikaVerzutti alongside one of her \u2018Painted Lady\u2019 sculptures, a fruit arrangement in bronze and pigmented wax that resembles an abstracted female form \u00a9 Luisa Dorr\"ErikaA detail from one of Verzutti\u2019s \u2018Painted Lady\u2019 sculptures \u00a9 Luisa Dorr<\/p>\n

They freely referenced Picasso\u2019s surrealist sculpture, Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i\u2019s columns and the amorphous bodies of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. In a recent exhibition at the same gallery in S\u00e3o Paulo, since renamed Fortes D\u2019Aloia & Gabriel, the assemblages are complex and odder still but have an additional loucheness: in one work a totem of multiple chayote fruits rests horizontally, like a labourer taking a snooze, one end propped up on a block of newspapers.<\/p>\n

Brancusi\u2019s columns \u201ccan be phallic symbols\u201d, Verzutti says. \u201cThey are modernist, but maybe they are too assertive for the times we are living through. I decided, OK, everybody\u2019s gonna take a break, and I ended up with these horizontal sculptures.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AAn arrangement of nascent fruit and vegetable sculptures sit alongside stones and clay on the floor of Verzutti\u2019s S\u00e3o Paulo studio \u00a9 Luisa Dorr<\/p>\n

Verzutti says she doesn\u2019t cast from real life so much now, and has gone back to moulding her pieces in clay by hand, allowing the size of her fruit to grow to sometimes monstrous dimensions. She puts the roughly fingerpocked elements into a single form on the workbench at which we are both sat. She then covers the sculptures in a layer of coloured wax or paints them with acrylic.<\/p>\n

The studio is located on the first floor of a residential block in the frenetic downtown of Brazil\u2019s largest city. There\u2019s a street market a couple of blocks away in which real melons and guava are piled high. From her S\u00e3o Paulo base, Verzutti\u2019s works have gone out into the world, including shows at the Centre Pompidou in 2019 and Nottingham Contemporary in 2021, with a home gig at the Museum of Art of S\u00e3o Paulo the same year. <\/p>\n

\"TallPart of Erika Verzutti\u2019s \u2018Venus\u2019 series \u00a9 Stuart Whipps, courtesy of the Nottingham Contemporary \"AnInstallation view of Verzutti\u2019s 2021 show in Nottingham, featuring one of her \u2018Painted Lady\u2019 sculptures on the left alongside totem-like sculptures that resemble Brancusi columns \u00a9 Stuart Whipps, courtesy of the Nottingham Contemporary<\/p>\n

She speaks of her work as a mother might her children. \u201cThe sculptures have their own lives when they leave the studio, in museums, people\u2019s houses, in bedrooms. Sometimes people show you your work, in a collector\u2019s house, and it can be positive or negative. It\u2019s like seeing your baby out in the world. Sometimes they are there stuffed between lots of things or in a bad situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s one work which now belongs to the Littlewoods heir and collector James Moores. \u201cIt\u2019s a small sculpture that sits in his kitchen in Shropshire,\u201d Verzutti says, \u201cnext to a garden gnome, and the salt and pepper. And I think that my sculpture is happy there. It\u2019s got a friend, it gets plenty of attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

Earlier this year Verzutti had an exhibition at LUMA Arles, and this month she returns to France in time for Sculptures Last Night \u2014 the latest edition of curator Julie Boukobza\u2019s annual exhibition series Pourquoi Paris?<\/a> \u2014 coinciding with Art Basel in Paris. But this time the venue is a far smaller affair: room 103 at the H\u00f4tel Balzac in Paris\u2019s eighth arrondissement.<\/p>\n

\"AnA series of Verzutti\u2019s small, phallic pieces in bronze and concrete, which will be on display at \u2018Sculptures Last Night\u2019 at Hotel Balzac \u00a9 Courtesy of the artist and Fortes D\u2019Aloia & Gabriel, S\u00e3o Paulo\/Rio de Janeiro<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not making work for the hotel, a sculpture that is a bedside lamp or something,\u201d she says. \u201cNo, the sculptures are guests of the hotel, they\u2019ve checked into a hotel room that will otherwise remain the same.\u201d <\/p>\n

There\u2019s only a certain amount of time you can stay in a hotel before feeling nauseous, regardless of how nice it is<\/p>\n

Erica Verzutti<\/p>\n

There are all sorts of guests at hotels \u2014 what kind will her sculptures be? She explains that among the dozen shown there will be a column, composed of bronze oversized eggs, which will lie on the bed, the duvet thrown asunder, while one of her so-called \u201cpainted ladies\u201d, bronze and pigmented wax works that assemble fruits into a roughly feminine form, gently entangles the larger work. They are amorous guests? \u201cThey are, I think, on the verge of breaking everything,\u201d she says. \u201cI think it\u2019s the day after the night before. The room is messy. There\u2019s only a certain amount of time you can stay in a hotel before feeling nauseous, regardless of how nice it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Parisian \u201cpainted lady\u201d is the latest of many: the Guggenheim in New York owns a leaner version, over two metres in height, formed of bronze-cast pomegranates and other fruit resting on a precarious base of bunched bananas; a 2011 version is more obviously feminine, a cast pomegranate and coconut fashioned for breasts. The newest will be curved, as if restfully spooning its partner.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AnAnother of Verzutti\u2019s \u2018Painted Lady\u2019 sculptures, this one from 2011 \u00a9 Ding Musa, courtesy of the artist and Fortes D\u2019Aloia & Gabriel, S\u00e3o Paulo\/Rio de Janeiro<\/p>\n

Verzutti reveals an unexpected inspiration. Not just the sensual modernism of Moore\u2019s reclining nudes or the ancient fertility statues of Venus, but a segment on L!VE TV, the short-lived British tabloid TV channel from the 1990s. \u201cThis was my first time in Britain and very late at night I came across a programme \u2014 super trashy \u2014 in which two girls in bikinis splashed each other with a random mix of coloured paints. It was absurd. It came to mind as I came to paint these sculptures a mix of blues and green.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

On the hotel television a film will play on a loop. While only eight minutes long, \u201cThe Life of Sculptures\u201d has been years in the making. It was initiated during her 2016 solo show at P\u00eevo, an arts space in S\u00e3o Paulo a few blocks from where we are talking.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"A\u2018Brasilia Sculpture\u2019 (2025), an oil on bronze by Erika Verzutti \u00a9 Courtesy of the artist and Fortes D\u2019Aloia & Gabriel<\/p>\n

\u201cI had an actress walking through the sculptures like a muse, and it was this super big production. We had lights and a snow machine, catering. It felt amazing, but when the images came I got scared. What was I going to do with all this? I didn\u2019t like it, the quality was too high. But I kept filming.\u201d<\/p>\n

She hired the actress again when she installed a series of animalistic modernist-tinged sculptures in the gardens of the Venice Biennale in 2017. But by the time she had resumed shooting in Switzerland a few years later she had decided against the actress\u2019s presence altogether. \u201cAfter seven years of making this film I realised the human character didn\u2019t make any sense. So I cut all of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, it is the sculptures that are shown in changing weather and light; strange alien children, out in the world, on their own. \u201cI wanted to show the sculptures living through time, showing them as time passes around them,\u201d Verzutti says. \u201cThe sculptures are the characters, they didn\u2019t need anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Erika Verzutti: Sculptures Last Night\u2019 is at the H\u00f4tel Balzac, Paris, October 20-26, fdag.com.br; Booth B48, Art Basel Paris, October 24-26, artbasel.com<\/p>\n

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