Andra Ursuța

Andra Ursuța (b. 1979, Salonta, Romania) is a sculptor based in New York whose work addresses mortality, cultural inheritance, and the darker undercurrents of collective experience through a deliberately contradictory range of materials and processes. Born in a small town on the Romanian-Hungarian border, she left for the United States in 1997 and received a BA in art history and visual arts from Columbia University in 2002. Her practice moves between cast glass, lead crystal, silicone, foam, and the disposable props that popular culture uses to stage fear which she subjects to processes of extreme precision and craft.

This tension between low material and high process is central to her work. In Vandal Lust (2011/2022), a large-scale installation, a trebuchet — a medieval siege weapon — stands poised to hurl a sculpture of the artist's own fallen figure through the wall of the exhibition space, placing the body at the intersection of historical violence and personal experience. A series of cast-glass sculptures, first presented at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), draws on processes that combine traditional glassmaking with industrial technology to produce objects that shift between the fragile, the pathological, and the monumental. More recent work in lead crystal, photograms, and bronze — a medium Ursuța had long resisted for its generic commemorative associations — extends these concerns into new formal territory, while consistently interrogating what materials, in art or in culture, are considered worthy of preservation.

Her first museum solo exhibition in New York, Alps, was curated by Massimiliano Gioni at the New Museum in 2016; further institutional solo shows include Kunsthalle Basel (2015), ICA Miami (2014–15), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin (2018–19), and the DESTE Foundation Project Space in Hydra (2025). She has participated in the Venice Biennale in 2013, 2019, and 2022, and the Istanbul Biennial in 2017. In 2024 she was selected for the Fourth Plinth Commission in London's Trafalgar Square, with her sculpture to be installed from 2028 to 2030.