Andra Ursuța

More recent shows by Ursuța combine both cutting-edge and ancient processes in their construction. Ursuța's "Nobodies" (2019) — with its six glass sculptures – uses both 3-D printing and ancient lost-wax casting, contrasting free will and choice, life and death, and ambition and helplessness. As described in an essay by Chris Wiley, this work captures the human tendency to “strive and stretch and sweat our way towards a more perfect body, and a calmer, clearer mind, [although] the undertow of decay will always be too strong for us to fight." The sculptures, the delicacy of their material and the intimacy of their forms, offer a sobering truth that “our bodies and our histories will vanish, like raindrops in an ocean squall. All of this might be for nothing, all of us might be nobodies.” As Ursuța defamiliarizes the bodily form, the remaining figures perhaps reveal "...our brains…locked in the prisons of our dying bodies." In the 2022 Venice Biennale, Ursuța's work was noted in the Telegraph as being "simultaneously alluring and unsettling crystalline figures, like cyborg amputees imagined by a female alter ego of Jacob Epstein." Ursuța's exhibit in the show was also noted in a review by Vanity Fair.

In her Stoner (2013) installation, Ursuța uses a fenced-off pitching machine that hurtles round rocks at a tiled wall containing strands of long, black hair (as if depicting that women are walled up inside) to explore themes of organized misogyny, jock culture, and competitive aggression.

Ursuţa’s work is held in public collections worldwide, including the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and the Rubell Museum, Miami. Ursuţa has been featured in three Venice biennials: 2013, 2019, and 2022. Ursuţa lives and works in New York.

In a 2012 New York Times review of Ursuța's Magical Terrorism, the newspaper's chief art critic Roberta Smith notes a relationship between Ursuța's personal experience and a wider generational experience. The sculptures contrast “systems of belief, economics and display, as well as different states of otherness. The disturbing impression is of time running backward, of civilization devolving.”

Ursuța's first solo exhibition – Andra Ursuța: The Management of Barbarism – was displayed in 2010 at Ramiken Crucible, NY. Since 2010, Ursuța's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent venues in the U.S. as well as internationally.

Andra Ursuța (born 1979) is a Romanian-American sculptor who has lived and worked in New York since 2000. Ursuța is known for her nihilistic portrayal of the human condition, confronting issues such as patriotism, violence against women, and the “expulsion of ethnic groups”. Ursuța's work is held in public collections worldwide.

Ursuța was born in 1979 in Salonta, (Hungarian: Nagyszalonta) Romania, a town on the Romanian-Hungarian border under the Communist leadership of Nicolae Ceaușescu. She emigrated to the United States in 1997, and moved to New York in 1999. In 2002, Ursuța received a Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Visual Arts from Columbia University in New York City.