Virginia Overton

Bortolami is pleased to present Virginia Overton’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, an installation of five new sculptures.

Four of the works are wall reliefs made from various metal components salvaged from a large-scale outdoor sign which was designed in the 1960s. The artist spent a year deconstructing each of the sign’s massive letters, bolt by bolt, into the parts which were repurposed for the works in this exhibition. With an abundance of material, Overton has utilized vestiges of the sign’s typeface, design, and previous fabrication techniques in tandem with her own sculptural interventions to abstract each material and form.

Untitled (nude descending a staircase), installed along the rear wall of the gallery, is constructed from one foot wide bands of stainless steel. Overton spent weeks cleaning the metal, removing decades of grime accrued outside to reveal a sleek, smooth reflective surface. Overton has bent each band of steel at different points to create undulating “limbs,” combining the curved and unfurling forms of the metal with new, steep, angular bends.

In contrast, an installation of layered fragments of galvanized sheet metal wraps around the gallery’s small second room, their weathered surfaces recalling the appearance of armor. Overton has overlapped each segment and fastened them directly to the wall creating a jagged patchwork of curves and squares in low relief.

In Untitled (cascade) and Untitled (gather), long, thin bands of galvanized steel flat stock have been cinched together with vises bolted to the wall. Each sculpture repositions the formerly rigid materials, allowing the inherent and newly “encouraged” curves to make the steel appear to flow downwards in cascade or to levitate in gather.

The fifth and final work, Untitled (muschio), is a green wool rug which has been placed in the center of the gallery and cut lengthwise to accommodate two of the architectural columns which bisect the space. It’s near-natural hue is a nod to the artist’s studio walls, concrete blocks painted green and patinated by sixty years of warehouse use as an oil supplier and bus parking garage. The rug, produced by an Italian manufacturer, comes from gallery owner Stefania Bortolami’s Greenwich Village apartment and was purchased by its previous owner, artist Cecily Brown. The only freestanding work in the show, its softness transforms the auditory experience of the gallery and its color reflects into the rugged, industrial materials which surround it.

Virginia Overton (b. 1971 in Nashville, Tennessee) lives and works in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Frist Art Museum, Nashville (2022); Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London (2022); Socrates Sculpture Park, New York (2018); Don River Valley Park, Toronto (2018); the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona (2017); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2016). Recent group exhibitions include La Biennale di Venezia (2022); Front Triennial, Cleveland (2018).

Overton has installed recent permanent public art installations at the Delta Terminal of the LaGuardia Airport in Queens, New York; The Refinery Building at Domino, Brooklyn, New York; and Hypermaremma, Maremma, Italy. Overton’s work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson; University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, Cleveland; Kunst Museum Bern, Switzerland; Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; The San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio and Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland.