This exhibition feels haunted. There are ghosts peering out of every canvas, captured in spectral photograms by Romanian artist Andra Ursuţa.
It’s a deeply unsettling, sad show. Ursuţa creates the works by laying objects on fabric in a darkroom, the chemicals pulling shapes and colour out of the ether, like every piece is made by communing with spirits. Each canvas features a skull screaming out of the darkness, its teeth bared, its eyes hollow. Skeletons reach for a handle in some of the works, seeking a way out of the abyss. In others, they explode into rays of light. It has a mystical, pre-modern, ouija board atmosphere, a desperation to speak with the dead, to make sense of a loss.
More skulls and bodies emerge in the sculptures here, like ghosts trying to become real but getting frozen in glass.
The whole show could have descended into schlocky morbid gothicness, but there’s a tender, genuine sadness here, a tangible loss being dealt with that makes it so much more than that.
