Brazilian sculptor Erika Verzutti has built her artistic career around an unexpected revelation: becoming a "fruit sculptor." The 54-year-old artist, whose oversized fruit sculptures rendered in clay, bronze, concrete, and papier-mâché have captivated international audiences, is now bringing her curvaceous works to an unconventional venue - room 103 at Paris's Hotel Balzac for the exhibition "Sculptures Last Night."
Verzutti's journey into fruit sculpture began in 2007 during a moment of creative inspiration in her kitchen. "I don't cook so much, but there was a moment around 2007 I felt this free association of various things that were on the kitchen table," the artist explains from her downtown São Paulo studio. "It felt like their imperfect forms might provide a new geometry that I could use. When this happened, it was a revelation, a form of salvation. I was going to become a fruit sculptor! This would be my thing that I could use forever."
For two decades, Verzutti has created works that are globular, totemic, and rich with art historical references. Her sculptures - often casts of bananas, gourds, and melons - are suggestively anthropomorphic and carry an element of absurdity that the artist deliberately embraces. In her downtown São Paulo studio, located on the first floor of a residential block near a street market where real melons and guava are piled high, these oversized fruits occupy every surface, from workbenches to floors.
Verzutti's artistic breakthrough came with her 2011 exhibition at the Brazilian gallery Fortes Vilaça, where she debuted sculptures featuring bronze gourds that seemed to leer suggestively at partnering blocks of concrete. A cast of a jackfruit stood on a plinth with a hole bored into its spiky skin, while a totem of two dozen star fruit fused together reached toward the ceiling. These works freely referenced Pablo Picasso's surrealist sculptures, Constantin Brâncuși's columns, and the amorphous bodies of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
The artist's recent works have evolved to become even more complex and unconventional. In a recent exhibition at the same São Paulo gallery, now renamed Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel, her assemblages display an additional sense of leisure and informality. One piece features a totem of multiple chayote fruits resting horizontally "like a laborer taking a snooze," with one end propped up on a block of newspapers. "Brâncuși's columns can be phallic symbols," Verzutti explains. "They are modernist, but maybe they are too assertive for the times we are living through. I decided, OK, everybody's gonna take a break, and I ended up with these horizontal sculptures."
Verzutti's creative process has also evolved significantly over the years. She no longer casts from real life as much, instead returning to molding her pieces in clay by hand, which allows the size of her fruit to grow to sometimes monstrous dimensions. She places the roughly finger-pocked elements into single forms before covering the sculptures in colored wax or painting them with acrylic. The artist speaks of her works with maternal affection, saying, "The sculptures have their own lives when they leave the studio, in museums, people's houses, in bedrooms. Sometimes people show you your work, in a collector's house, and it can be positive or negative. It's like seeing your baby out in the world."
One particularly cherished placement involves a small sculpture belonging to Littlewoods heir and collector James Moores. "It's a small sculpture that sits in his kitchen in Shropshire," Verzutti notes, "next to a garden gnome, and the salt and pepper. And I think that my sculpture is happy there. It's got a friend, it gets plenty of attention."
Verzutti's international presence has grown substantially, with exhibitions at prestigious venues including the Centre Pompidou in 2019, Nottingham Contemporary in 2021, and the Museum of Art of São Paulo the same year. Earlier this year, she exhibited at LUMA Arles, and now returns to France for the latest edition of curator Julie Boukobza's annual exhibition series "Pourquoi Paris?" coinciding with Art Basel in Paris.
The Hotel Balzac exhibition represents a unique conceptual approach for Verzutti. "I'm not making work for the hotel, a sculpture that is a bedside lamp or something," she clarifies. "No, the sculptures are guests of the hotel, they've checked into a hotel room that will otherwise remain the same." Among the dozen works displayed, a column composed of bronze oversized eggs will lie on the bed with the duvet thrown asunder, while one of her "painted ladies" - bronze and pigmented wax works that assemble fruits into roughly feminine forms - gently entangles the larger piece.
These "painted ladies" represent some of Verzutti's most significant works. The Guggenheim in New York owns a leaner version over two meters in height, formed of bronze-cast pomegranates and other fruit resting on a precarious base of bunched bananas. A 2011 version features more obviously feminine characteristics, with cast pomegranate and coconut fashioned as breasts. The newest Parisian version will be curved, "as if restfully spooning its partner."
Surprisingly, one inspiration for these sensual sculptures came from an unexpected source: a segment on L!VE TV, a short-lived British tabloid television channel from the 1990s. "This was my first time in Britain and very late at night I came across a programme - super trashy - in which two girls in bikinis splashed each other with a random mix of colored paints," Verzutti reveals. "It was absurd. It came to mind as I came to paint these sculptures a mix of blues and green."
Accompanying the hotel installation is "The Life of Sculptures," an eight-minute film that has been years in the making. Initially conceived during her 2016 solo show at Pîvo, an arts space in São Paulo, the project originally featured an actress walking through the sculptures. However, after seven years of filming in various locations including the Venice Biennale gardens in 2017 and Switzerland, Verzutti made a crucial decision. "After seven years of making this film I realized the human character didn't make any sense. So I cut all of that," she explains. The final version shows only the sculptures themselves in changing weather and light - "strange alien children, out in the world, on their own."
The artist's philosophy about her work reflects a deep understanding of sculpture as living entities that exist independently once they leave her studio. "There's only a certain amount of time you can stay in a hotel before feeling nauseous, regardless of how nice it is," she notes about the hotel exhibition concept. When describing her bronze and concrete sculptures as hotel guests, she suggests they are "on the verge of breaking everything" and that "it's the day after the night before. The room is messy."
Verzutti's latest exhibition "Sculptures Last Night" runs at the Hotel Balzac in Paris from October 20-26, with the artist also participating in Art Basel Paris from October 24-26. The exhibition continues her exploration of sculpture as autonomous beings that inhabit and transform the spaces they occupy, whether in prestigious museums, private collections, or unconventional venues like hotel rooms.
