Virginia Overton (b. 1971 in Nashville) has introduced new accents with her large-format, site-specific sculptures for years. The American artist refers to Minimalism of the 1960s in her practice. Her work is site specific, and she has an affinity to using industrial materials that she finds in the surroundings of her exhibition venues. Leaving the material unmodified to a great extent, she reconfigures it, along with its traces of use and wear, into new structures. Her focus on processes and improvisation stem from her artistic strategy to construct and bolt together sculptures instead of modeling or carving them from stone. She works with construction material, scaffolding, and car parts—but she might also use beams from an old barn or the floor of a building slated for demolition. When she came across the monumental sign of a factory building on the East River in Brooklyn, she could not resist it, ultimately disassembling and recycling it to create a room-filling installation. According to the raw material involved, each project involves different techniques, which is always clearly revealed as an aesthetic element of the sculptures. For viewers, the objects are physically impressive equivalents that link human scale and architecture in the exhibition space. For this reason, Overton likes to intervene in the existing architecture with her sculptures as an additional element in her artistic dispositive. The sculptures blend into the surroundings and transform the spaces into balanced structures or precarious ones, which threaten to go out of joint. Her exhibitions heighten our perception of space, materials, and the unsteadiness of our surroundings, which we usually pay little attention to in everyday life.

Curated by Lynn Kost