21:15 – Julien Creuzet and Erika Vertuzzi at Andrew Kerps Gallery
September 9 – October 29, 2022
394 Broadway
Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce flapping feathers our hands our wings glimmer to dance the orange sky, an exhibition of new works by Julien Creuzet at 394 Broadway, the artist’s first exhibition in New York.
Both skeletal and architectural, Julien Creuzet’s materially dense sculptures weave together his own lived experience with the broader, social reality of the Caribbean Diaspora, which is the result of shared history but simultaneously, has produced a multitude of outcomes. Abstract in appearance, the works’ metal armatures are drawn from maps, topographies, and an array of other images. The resulting forms slowly accrue media, found and new plastics in kaleidoscopic color, detritus, torn fabric, varying textures, and the vestiges of Creuzet’s own touch, creating an accumulation of material that feels like the aftermath of moving through time and place. In dialogue with Creuzet’s writing practice, the titles of his sculptures are excerpted from his own poetry and function as a point of entry, connecting the tangible, historical references within the work with the concerns of the present. Resisting a finite narrative, and remaining open-ended, Creuzet’s sculptures are embedded with the anxieties of impending climate crises, the question of emancipation, and a desire for Black affirmation.
In a new video titled Crossroads, an abstracted figure adorned with feathers, fruits, the wreckage of ships, and viruses, dances in a Bèlè style. A legacy of the music traditions of enslaved people in Martinique Bèlè combined music and movement to create new forms of emotional expression and became a vital form of resistance. Overlayed with texts, and interwoven with imagery of plants and flora, the video is set to sound produced by Creuzet and spoken word in Martinican Creole, suggesting a dialogue with the continuing influence of the Caribbean diaspora on contemporary music. Throughout his work, Creuzet looks to combine both visual and aural languages, to bring together fragments of place, history, and perceptions, into new forms of plurality and dialogue.
Julien Creuzet (b. 1986) is a French-Caribbean artist who lives and works in Paris. His work is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the LUMA Foundation, Arles, titled Orpheus was musing upon braised words, under the light rain of a blazing fog, snakes are deaf and dumb anyway, oblivion buried in the depths of insomnia. Past solo exhibitions include Camden Arts Centre, 2021, CAN Centre d’art Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 2019, Palais De Tokyo, 2019, and Fondation Ricard, Paris, 2018. Creuzet has additionally participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020, In 2021, Creuzet was nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp, and in 2019 was the recipient of the Camden Arts Centre prize at Frieze London.
Erika Verzutti: Churros and Rain at Andrew Kreps Gallery
22 Cortlandt Alley
September 9 – November 3, 2022
Andrew Kreps is pleased to announce Churros and Rain, an exhibition of new works by Erika Verzutti.
Tactile in its approach, Erika Verzutti’s practice rests between sculpture and painting, drawing on a wide range of references from nature to popular culture. Shapes derived from fruits or vegetables recur alongside familiar objects, self-referential gestures, and images culled from social media to form a new vernacular. Firmly rooted in studio practice, Verzutti’s work revels in its process and explores how disparate ideas and perceptions take on a physical form.
A series of works that reference the totemic form of the Venus of Willendorf occupy the gallery floor. Varying in scale and executed in bronze and papier mâché, Verzutti’s Venuses are comprised of fruits, both molded from the actual object and shaped by hand from memory. Precariously stacked, each work in turn performs a “ headstand “ pose, positioned to support their own weight. For this exhibition, Verzutti has created new configurations whose bulbous forms are further emphasized through a contoured application of paint.
This free, and playful engagement with art history permeates Verzutti’s work and continues in a new series of papier mâché works dripped and splattered with paint in a manner reminiscent of Jackson Pollock, simultaneously pre-meditated and accidental. Verzutti applies extruded forms, which she refers to as churros, onto the surface arranged in varying configurations to suggest hanging weather cycles, and flows of water or air, which are further conjured by the works’ individual titles: Churros with wind, Umbrellas and Chaos, Churros Turbulence, among others. This fluidity between abstraction and figuration is also embraced in wall-based bronzes, which are driven by the process of their making, exhibiting the unaltered vestiges of Verzutti’s own hands and fingers. These immediate marks and decisions are used as both a guide and a challenge for the completion of the work, as paint is applied in methods that waver between gestural, illustrative, and suggestive. Seen together, Verzutti’s work looks to conflate personal history with shared, universal experiences, and explore how material can continuously be recombined, reused, and reconfigured to forge new outcomes and ideas.
In 2021, MASP, Sao Paulo, presented the most extensive survey of Verzutti’s practice to date, titled The Indiscipline of Sculpture. Other past solo exhibitions include Nottingham Contemporary, 2021, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2019, Venus Yogini, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, 2019, Swan, Cucumber, Dinosaur, Pivô, São Paulo, 2016, Swan with Stage, Sculpture Center, New York, 2015, and Mineral, Tang Museum, Saratoga, 2014. Erika Verzutti’s work is currently included in the 3rd Geneva Biennale – Sculpture Garden, on view through September 30, 2022. Verzutti has additionally participated in numerous major exhibitions, including the 2019 Bienal de Arte Contemporanea de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal, the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017, 32ª Bienal de São Paulo, 2016, 2013 Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, 2013, among others. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Tate Modern, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo and Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, among others.
