Andra Ursuţa: Void Fill (2021) and the Grotesque Fragment

Resumé

This paper offers a new interpretative framework for the corpus of Andra Ursuţa and for the art historical lineages of the grotesque and the bodily fragment to which her concatenations of body and object belong. The hollow, crystalline skins of the artist’s 2021 exhibition, Void Fill, cannily emblematize a world scenario in which objects become increasingly subjectivized and subjects self-objectify. Resurrecting Bakhtinian terms of the grotesque alongside Linda Nochlin’s conception of the “fragment,” I offer the “grotesque fragment” as a term of art for both a formal strategy in artistic figuration and a state of contemporary quasi-human embodiment in which worldly forces and perceptual revolutions press the body into forms which are both in excess of itself (grotesque) and diminished (fragmented). In their pithy titles, their canny choice of materials, and their formal experiments in figure-object synthesis, Andra Ursuţa’s sculptures leverage traditions of fragmentation and grotesquerie in art to offer a melancholic yet humorous take on powers which stress and reform the human epidermal boundary.