In Practice: Ana Gzirishvili

Ana Gzirishvili’s practice spans poetry, film, sculpture, and installation. At SculptureCenter, Gzirishvili presents a new group of sculptures made from expanses of leather that she wets, stretches, and tightly wraps around handmade frames and across assemblages. Once dry, she peels them from their molds, resulting in stiff reliefs that register partial impressions of objects like bricks, fruit, furniture, and earlier abstract sculptures made of materials like plasticine and plaster, as well as the space between them.

Gzirishvili’s recent research has led her to the “skin ego,” a psychoanalytic idea elaborated by Didier Anzieu (1923-1999) that compares the physical containment of the body (under skin) to the psychic containment of the self. Her work processes this idea in the form of tough animal skins (and, newly, light-colored fabrics) that wind and wrap around unseen cores, that pick up traces of things, and convey a sensation of overuse, collapse, and wear—the self-protective sensing membrane breached, exposed, and altered by its environment.

Gzirishvili’s new sculptures show the results of this process and thinking. Singular, irregularly shaped leather skins reproduce bits of the world in tattered monochrome relief. Their folds are rigid but trace softer insides; they are unassuming, they slouch or sit low to the ground, and their surfaces are either supple or desiccated and hardened. It follows that the economy of Gzirishvili’s work prioritizes the secondhand, the used, and the found—ideas associated with cold mass production, uneven consumption, and detritus, as are the markets where Gzirishvili often sources art materials. At the same time, by holding material forms of clothing, furniture, shoes, and the architecture of lived-in rooms, her work subtly circles an absent, complex subject and its conflicted body.

In Practice: Ana Gzirishvili is curated by Jovanna Venegas, Curator and Kyle Dancewicz, Deputy Director.