Andra Ursuța: Apocalypse Now and Then

Romanian artist Andra Ursuţa (born 1979) draws from the visual language and display strategies of archeological museums to invent faux-historical artefacts belonging to a defunct civilization whose relics seem to speak to the anxieties of our present. For her 2025 exhibition Apocalype Now and Then at the DESTE Foundation’s Slaughterhouse space in Hydra, Ursuţa displayed fragments of sculptures and studio detritus that had been successively built up and destroyed with analog and digital tools, including Desolation Ware, a series of lost-wax cast bronze sculptures. This publication documents the site-specific installation with vivid imagery and explores its themes in new texts by DESTE founder Dakis Joannou, curator Elena Filipovic, and the artist herself. Exploring the history of object-making and sculpture and the ways in which this manually-derived system of knowledge and speculation has come to shape our visual world, Apocalypse Now and Then transports readers into a realm in which passingly familiar ancient tropes, grotesque votives, and scarred bronze figures hover between archaeology and fiction.

Edited by:

Karen Marta

Year of publication:

2026

ISBN:

978-618-5039-46-2

English / Hardcover / 28 x 21 cm / 96 pages