Orgy For Ten People In One Body

Isabelle Albuquerque: Orgy For Ten People In One Body

  • Shot/Edited // Shane Allen.
This November, Albuquerque will present Orgy For Ten People In One Body at Jeffrey Deitch in New York. The exhibition brings together for the first time her complete series of ten headless figurative sculptures created between 2019 and 2022. In this work, the artist uses her own body and transmutes it across multiple forms and material languages. With a background in performance, Albuquerque is interested in materials like cast bronze and melting wax that encode a precise moment in time, making something once fleeting more eternal.

Isabelle Albuquerque

I went to see Isabelle’s show Orgy for Ten while on I was on mushrooms the other day at Deitch Gallery in Soho. It was quite an experience, especially for the fact that I was the only one in the gallery when I entered, and then about 15 people walked to see me staring at a naked woman getting eaten out by teddy bears.

This white heaven-like space was filled with these headless women placed in compromising positions. Each woman was made of a different material that sort of contrasted with whatever fixture they were laying on. I was definitely mesmerized by the whole thing and remember thinking I hadn’t seen a show this unique in a while. As striking and sexual as the show is I feel like it was a really interesting study of how you can capture one thing in many different ways.

Isabelle did a great job at capturing this oddly vulnerable and sexual essence in a sort of vague mysterious way. One of the figures was a woman whose skin was the fur of a deer in the fetal position facing the wall. A little bit uncomfortable at first to think about the implications of such a thing, but once you got past the shock value it made you wonder what it was feeling. Another figure was golden who was playing the saxophone with her vagina. Another bee’s-wax woman, tied up on the floor. All super interesting subject matter that was both eye-catching and pretty to look at, yet captured some sort of surreal magic that was brought to life in a very minimal way.

Are all of these different personalities of Isabelle, different moments of her life captured in a pose, feelings she had personified and embodied?

Usually in my opinion sculpture is really fun and interesting. But when you sculpt the human body, you’re competing with Michaelangelo’s David ya know? Masterpieces of the human body have already been made and if you’re going to compete with that then it better be pretty interesting in a way that isn’t simply just duplicating the human form. We see thousands of bodies every day, we are all walking sculptures.

Good job Isabelle, really cool.

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