Luana Vitra: Amulets and In Practice 2025–26

Luana Vitra: Amulets
May 1–July 28, 2025

Opening reception: April 30, 2025, 6–8pm

SculptureCenter is pleased to present the first institutional exhibition in the United States of artist Luana Vitra. Luana Vitra’s practice is deeply intertwined with her home region of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The mineral-rich state is known for its historical export of gold through forced labour and for its current prominence in the extractive iron mining industry. Through an abstract language that encompasses drawing, painting, performance, sculpture, and installation, her work is interested in the metallurgical and transformative charge of minerals and their capacity for metamorphosis, often creating a dialogue between the natural and industrial manifestations of materials.

For her SculptureCenter commission, Luana Vitra: Amulets, Vitra temporarily makes visible the threshold between the physical and spiritual presence of minerals through an energetically directed environment, presenting minerals as ritual manifestation. They take shape in a new set of sculptures that include tall iron totems wrapped in white fabric and detailed with amarrações: knots that symbolise the act of sealing the gesture of intention at the moment of invoking a spell, or as a way of enclosing it within. Amulets reinforces Vitra’s dedication to an aesthetic rooted in the spiritual. She invites visitors to look beyond sculptures’ material properties of sculpture and its circulation as commodities within a capitalist economy, and to envision another dimension to which they belong. The mineral forms she conjures–often emerging first in dreams–become visual prayers, spiritual manifestation, or incantations.

In Practice 2025–26
May 2025–July 2026

Opening reception with Sam Cottington and Alejandro Villabona: April 30, 2025, 6–8pm
Opening reception with Kevin Hernández Rosa: Jun 18, 2025, 6–8pm

SculptureCenter is pleased to announce the artists selected from our 2025–26 In Practice Open Call. Each exhibition is the artist’s first solo exhibition in a New York City institution, and each artist will present new work commissioned by SculptureCenter. Since 2003, SculptureCenter’s In Practice Open Call program has supported the production of new work by over 270 artists.

In Practice: Sam Cottington and Alejandro Villabona
May 1–June 9, 2025

Sam Cottington and Alejandro Villabona will develop a new video installation and performance for SculptureCenter. Together their work condenses vocal fragments from an omnipresent cloud of popular media, internet phenomena, and personal communication into new monologues marked by ambivalent relations between speaker and receiver. Skirting context (and often clear content) in favor of sonic texture, their texts capture a particular unsettled subjectivity and expressive range in the language of our time, rapidly driving the tone of address from self-consciously performative, to callous, to menacing and manipulative.

In Practice: Kevin Hernández Rosa
June 19–July 28, 2025

Kevin Hernández Rosa often makes sculpture that alludes to the body in discomfort, whether in the course of normal regulation, in response to harsh environments, or under direct assault. His materials for his forthcoming In Practice exhibition include modified found objects alongside carved, welded, and assembled forms. Hernández Rosa will exhibit new works linking a wooden revolver prototype whittled by Samuel Colt circa 1830—a impotent but sinister folk object of sorts, now in a special firearms collection in Connecticut—to conditions of violence today.

In Practice: Nadim Choufi
October 2025

Nadim Choufi’s work explores how ideals of progress manifest and seduce, and the price of such visions on the lives subjected to their realization. Through sculpture, film, and text, Choufi draws on visual and literary practices that oppose or complicate narratives of national and global progress. In a new publication for his project at SculptureCenter, Choufi composes a cento poem from lines borrowed from Arab poets who transform themselves, their lovers, and their people into animals and natural elements, speaking through these tongues of love and resistance.

In Practice: Coco Klockner
October–December 2025

Coco Klockner’s practice moves between text, sound, sculpture, and architectural intervention, immersing viewers in site-responsive environments that probe the ways systems of representation are constructed. The forms that emerge in her work mirror and intersect the dynamics embedded in the structural concerns of transness, examining the terms through which its status is constituted. For SculptureCenter, she will present a new installation that uses light, packed earth, moisture, and vibration to resound an intimate encounter between lovers while exploring the conditions that shape language and desire.

In Practice: Ana Gzirishvili
January–March 2026

Ana Gzirishvili’s practice spans poetry, film, sculpture, and installation, exploring the liminal spaces between beings, objects, and material and immaterial realms. Her works engage with themes of transitionality, circulation, and displacement, often through disassembling and reassembling contexts and forms. For In Practice, she will create a new group of leather sculptures sourced from aged furniture, reshaped into still life arrangements inspired by various architectural contexts that explore the scars and traces left by objects and spaces.

In Practice: Magdalena Petroni
May–June 2026

Magdalena Petroni’s practice delves into the subtext of meaning in popular visual language, drawing from media, branding, and online subcommunities. Layering painting and sculpture, her works often accumulate within immersive  installations. Dissimilar objects are assembled in a frantic manner, exploring alterity, the uncanny, and the extrasensory in relation to the alienated. For In Practice, she examines the blurred boundaries between reality and hyperreality through a labyrinthine structure that expands on her research into perception, liminal spaces, and movie sets.

In Practice: Michaela Bathrick
June–August 2026

Michaela Bathrick’s work finds subtle instances of expression in the functional forms of the built environment. Head-on, her sculptures—primarily made of cast cement treated with soap stain—seem formal, weathered, and neglected, like brackets or fittings decommissioned from a public building. From other angles, they resemble letters or bits of language, drawing out the wry, barely ornamental excesses of public space, and creating the sense that the city may be built of incomplete utterances. Bathrick is developing a new body of work for In Practice.

Support
Generous support for Luana Vitra: Amulets is provided by Jana and Bernardo Hees, Fernanda Feitosa and Heitor Martins, and the Henry Moore Foundation. Additional funding is provided by Instituto Guimarães Rosa / Consulate General of Brazil in New York, Molly Gochman, ARTNOIR, and Priscila and Alvin Hudgins. Special thanks to Mitre Galeria, Belo Horizonte and São Paulo.

In Practice is made possible by the Elaine Graham Weitzen Commissioning Fund for Emerging Artists.

Major support for the In Practice 2025–26 program is provided by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. The In Practice program is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Generous support for In Practice is provided by Sarah Elson.

Luana Vitra: Amulets and In Practice exhibitions by Coco Klockner, Ana Gzirishvili, Magdalena Petroni, and Michaela Bathrick are supported by the Eva Hesse Initiative for New Sculpture.

Support for all of SculptureCenter’s work with artists from abroad is provided by the International Council: Anonymous, Stephen Cheng, Micki Meng, Yan Du, Thomas Berger, Antonio Murzi and Diana Morgan, Audrey Rose Smith and Vicente Muñoz, Füsun Eczacıbaşı - SAHA.

Leadership support for SculptureCenter’s exhibitions and programs is provided by Carol Bove, Barbara and Andrew Gundlach, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, and Teiger Foundation. Major support is provided by Richard Chang, Jill and Peter Kraus, Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins, Eleanor Heyman Propp, Jacques Louis Vidal, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Generous support is provided by Candy and Michael Barasch, Libby and Adrian Ellis, Andrew Fine and David Andersson, Jane Hait and Justin Beal, Gabrielle Humphrey, Amy and Sean Lyons, David Maclean, Ronay and Richard Menschel, the May and Samuel Rudin Foundation, Inc., and Fred Wilson. Additional funding is provided by Lily Lyons, Charmaine and Roman Mendoza, Elizabeth and Matt Quigley, Katharine Ristich, Alexander S.C. Rower, Julien Sarkozy, Carla Shen, and Lisa Young and Steven Abraham.

Thank you to London Performance Studios for rehearsal space support in preparation for In Practice: Sam Cottington and Alejandro Villabona.

In Practice: Ana Gzirishvili will be developed in residence at Launch Pad LaB, France.