AWT FOCUS

AWT BUS: 11.6 Fri – 11.8 Sun, Route A-4

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

The curtain-raiser for this solo exhibition by Erika Verzutti at Misako & Rosen—the artist’s fourth with the gallery—was a bedroom show that took place in 2025 at Hôtel Balzac in Paris as part of the curatorial platform I founded, Pourquoi Paris? Entitled “Sculptures Last Night,” the hotel presentation was a leap of faith for Verzutti and me, an inscrutable pact between artist and curator imposed by a truly intimate setting. Materials and surfaces collided: Bronze, carpet, concrete, linen, marble, curtains, ceramics all explored different positions and ways of behaving or presenting themselves to the world. Sculptures played the part of unruly hotel guests, interweaving in bed, lying on the floor, or nestling in the shower, only witnessed night and day by the artist’s drawings framed on the bathroom walls.
Now, for “Portrait of Sculpture” at Misako & Rosen, the drawings take center stage as the main protagonists, shifting away from the voyeuristic disorder of Paris. Following extensive research by the artist, they have become oil monoprints, fleeing the soft natural light of the hotel room for the hard, white-cube lighting of the gallery. Verzutti considers her drawings to be an aftermath/afterlife of her sculptures, something akin to a storyboard for a film that has already been shot. The film in this case is The Life of Sculptures (2024), directed in collaboration with Joana Luz, which played on a loop on the television in the Paris hotel room. Verzutti reveals through the works in Tokyo that she has always been inspired by Abstract Expressionist drawings: white paper, black pencil, bold moves, concrete ideas. She makes her monoprints months after a show, depicting portraits or scenes of dear sculptures that are long gone to different hands and homes in order to stretch the impossible time span of the things we love.
— Julie Boukobza