Erika Verzutti
Erika Verzutti’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures represent the denizens of alternative worlds located somewhere between the real and the fantastic. Tropical plants occupy an especially privileged position in the Brazilian artist’s iconography. Formed from bronze casts of bananas, pomegranates, and other fruits, and inhabiting an ambiguous space between representation and abstraction, Painted Lady (2012) has an uncanny anthropomorphic quality. In Venus on Fire (2013), organic forms are endowed with allusions to archeology and ethnography, and given a fertile erotic charge.
Verzutti has had solo exhibitions at Centro Cultural da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2003); Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo (2008, 2010, and 2011); Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich (2012); and Centro Cultural São Paulo (2012). Her work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including When Lives Become Form: Creative Power from Brazil, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, Barbican Centre, London (both 2008); Home Again, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Lilliput, High Line Art, New York; and Aire de Lyon, Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires (all 2012); Mitologias por Procuração, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2013); and Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil …
Erika Verzutti’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures represent the denizens of alternative worlds located somewhere between the real and the fantastic. Tropical plants occupy an especially privileged position in the Brazilian artist’s iconography. Formed from bronze casts of bananas, pomegranates, and other fruits, and inhabiting an ambiguous space between representation and abstraction, Painted Lady (2012) has an uncanny anthropomorphic quality. In Venus on Fire (2013), organic forms are endowed with allusions to archeology and ethnography, and given a fertile erotic charge.
Verzutti has had solo exhibitions at Centro Cultural da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2003); Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo (2008, 2010, and 2011); Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich (2012); and Centro Cultural São Paulo (2012). Her work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including When Lives Become Form: Creative Power from Brazil, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, Barbican Centre, London (both 2008); Home Again, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Lilliput, High Line Art, New York; and Aire de Lyon, Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires (all 2012); Mitologias por Procuração, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2013); and Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2014). Her work has been included in the Lyon Biennial (2011) and Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2013), and she completed a residency with Arts Initiative Tokyo (2010). Verzutti lives and works in São Paulo.
