ExhibitionFebruary 14, 2023
Erika Verzutti: Tantra
Tantra, the first exhibition in Mexico by Erika Verzutti (São Paulo, 1971), unfolds unexpected affinities between the domestic, the organic, the exotic, the spiritual, and the monstrous. The exhibition, curated by Tatiana Cuevas, will be on view until April 16, 2023.
Over more than two decades, Verzutti has created families of sculptures—that is how she conceives them, identifying some works as the grandmothers of later ones—that revisit the work of artists such as Tarsila do Amaral, Constantin Brancusi, Piet Mondrian, Phillip Guston, among others, while drawing inspiration from elements found in nature such as plants, fruits, stones, and minerals, highlighting their anthropomorphic possibilities, their ritual charge and their relationship with memory.
Around 2011, Verzutti integrated hybrid works between sculpture and painting into her practice. She modeled the surface of rectangular clay tablets that she later cast in bronze to intervene with them pictorially, playing with texture, volume, and color. In the project developed for the Museo Experimental el Eco, for the first time in her career, all the works in the exhibition are made of ceramic, which she carried out in collaboration with the ceramic factory Suro, located in Guadalajara. Following Mathias Goeritz's ideas on the use of color, form, and texture to determine the way we perceive and relate to the spaces we go through, Verzutti has produced a prolific sequence of tablets that, by dint of repetition, generate a vibrant stimulus similar to a meditative mantra that evokes above all the tantric drawings of Rajasthan, in northern India. Derived from 16th-century Hindu illustrated treatises, the lexicon of these images has been used for centuries to reach a higher level of consciousness and make amulets to carry in the pocket.
Over more than two decades, Verzutti has created families of sculptures—that is how she conceives them, identifying some works as the grandmothers of later ones—that revisit the work of artists such as Tarsila do Amaral, Constantin Brancusi, Piet Mondrian, Phillip Guston, among others, while drawing inspiration from elements found in nature such as plants, fruits, stones, and minerals, highlighting their anthropomorphic possibilities, their ritual charge and their relationship with memory.
Around 2011, Verzutti integrated hybrid works between sculpture and painting into her practice. She modeled the surface of rectangular clay tablets that she later cast in bronze to intervene with them pictorially, playing with texture, volume, and color. In the project developed for the Museo Experimental el Eco, for the first time in her career, all the works in the exhibition are made of ceramic, which she carried out in collaboration with the ceramic factory Suro, located in Guadalajara. Following Mathias Goeritz's ideas on the use of color, form, and texture to determine the way we perceive and relate to the spaces we go through, Verzutti has produced a prolific sequence of tablets that, by dint of repetition, generate a vibrant stimulus similar to a meditative mantra that evokes above all the tantric drawings of Rajasthan, in northern India. Derived from 16th-century Hindu illustrated treatises, the lexicon of these images has been used for centuries to reach a higher level of consciousness and make amulets to carry in the pocket.
Gallery
