Oversized fruits can be found everywhere in Erika Verzutti’s downtown São Paulo studio. Rendered in clay, bronze, concrete and papier-mâché, the sculptures — finished and work-in-progress — sit on the workbench and floor.
For two decades the Brazilian artist has made works that are globular, totemic and delight in quoting art history. These sculptures, often casts of bananas, gourds and melons, are also suggestively anthropomorphic.
“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 54-year-old artist says, pouring coffee. “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.”
The sculptures have their own lives when they leave the studio, in museums, houses, bedrooms. It’s like seeing your baby out in the world
Erika Verzutti
