In her new show “Orgy For Ten People In One Body” at Jeffrey Deitch New York, the Los Angeles artist Isabelle Albuquerque debuts a collection of bodily sculptures created over the last four years.
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.
Charged with personal experience, collective history and futuristic projection, 'Orgy For Ten People In One Body' performs and subverts art historical narratives and archetypes. Classic interspecies love stories like Leda and the Swan and Romulus and Remus meet new embodiments of hybrid creatures, mythic mothers, witches, pussies and saints. The work invites a poetic acceptance of multi-beingness, non-linear time, metamorphosis and a merge between self and other. Here, the body becomes a force of solidarity and pleasure—an activated collective site of resistance, power and ecstasy.
Isabelle Albuquerque lives and works in Los Angeles. She is the daughter of Lita Albuquerque, the granddaughter of Ferida “Fred” Albuquerque and the great-granddaughter of Smarda the Jewel—a matriarchal lineage of artists from North Africa. She is a founding member of the Los Angeles performance group Hecuba, which she started with her long-time partner Jon Ray. Albuquerque and Ray are also founders of Osk, a studio that develops artificial intelligence to create and look at art and individual experience through hybrid human and nonhuman perspectives. 'Orgy For Ten People In One Body' will be Albuquerque’s first solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch. She is currently working on a monograph about the series that includes an in-depth visual essay and conversations with the artists Arthur Jafa and Miranda July.
