Andra Ursuţa
b. 1979, Romania
Andra Ursuţa has gained recognition for her inventive sculptural work that mines the darker undercurrents of contemporary society. Drawing from memory, nostalgia, art history, and popular culture and employing a variety of media, the artist merges traditional sculptural processes and new technologies to transform commonplace objects and materials into viscerally evocative sculptures and installations that give new, redemptive form to subjective experience.
Ursuţa was born in 1979 in Salonta, Romania, a town on the Romanian-Hungarian border, and left for the United States in 1997. She moved to New York in 1999, and received a BA in art history and visual arts in 2002 from Columbia University, New York.
The artist has been represented by David Zwirner since 2020, and her first exhibition, Void Fill, was on view at the gallery’s Paris location in 2021.
In 2018–2019, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work, Andra Ursuţa: Vanilla Isis, was presented at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy. Andra Ursuţa: Alps, which was on view in 2016 at the New Museum, New York, marked the artist’s first museum show in New York. Ursuţa’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent venues internationally, including the Kunsthalle Basel (2015); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2014–2015); Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles (2014); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2014); and the Peep-Hole Art Center, Milan (2014). Ramiken Crucible, New York, presented the artist’s first solo exhibition, Andra Ursuţa: The Management of Barbarism, in 2010.
Ursuţa’s work is currently on view in the group exhibition ARS22: Living Encounters, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland. Her work has also been included in important group exhibitions worldwide, such as the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); Souffle de son souffle, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, France (2021–2022); 58th Venice Biennale (2019); The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2019); The Trick Brain, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (2017–2018); 15th Istanbul Biennial (2017); High Anxiety: New Acquisitions, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2016–2017); 13th Lyon Biennale (2015–2016); Artists and Poets, Secession, Vienna (2015); Busted, The High Line, New York (2013–2014); 55th Venice Biennale (2013); Expo 1: New York, MoMA PS1, New York (2013); and Ostalgia, New Museum, New York (2011).
The artist’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 lives and works in New York.