Meet the Maker Crafting Copper Sculptures and Furniture with a Blowtorch and a Hammer
Romanian artist Marius Ritiu produces tables, chairs, and sculptures with a lunar-like texture which will inaugurate Objects With Narratives’ new Antwerp gallery this fall
Artist Marius Ritiu starts with a sheet of industrial copper, heats it with a blowtorch, drapes it over a boulder, and starts hammering. “I am basically trashing the metal,” he says of his process.
Thousands of blows later, the artist has produced a material that looks like the surface of the moon, which he cuts apart and solders back together to produce chairs, tables, and other sculptural forms. “The works I’m making seem to be copied from nature,” he says, “but the actual shape I present in the end does not exist in nature.”
Born in Satu Mare, in Romania’s Transylvania region, Ritiu first worked in clay after an art teacher recognized his talent for sculpture. After earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sculpture, he set off with a fellow artist on what was meant to be a four-day scouting trip through Europe’s leading art cities. That was in 2010; Antwerp was the first stop. “In the first six months we were here, we were accepted into the Academy, met a collector with a foundation, and had a gallery show,” he recalls. “Everything happened very fast.” He never left.
Copper entered his life while studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where he helped a professor create and install copper ornamentation for a church dome. Later, he spent a summer in Romania working alongside metalworkers whose low-tech methods were an eye-opener. “When you don’t have money for advanced technology and tools, you have to improvise,” he says. “That mentality gave me the incentive to think about working with these materials in a different way.”
His own technique evolved after his partnership with the aforementioned fellow artist ended in 2017. Instead of following traditional Repousse methods of hammering copper into molds, Ritiu creates his own “nomadic” version, draping copper sheets directly over rocks, allowing their cracks, cavities, and contours to dictate the surface.
“You have to give yourself and the material a bit of room for interpretation,” he says. “If you have too much of a fixed idea that you want to impose, it could look forced.” Despite their hefty appearance, Ritiu’s pieces are surprisingly light, the product of an intensely physical process that leaves almost nothing behind.
Not only does his individual technique set him apart from others it has also led to unexpected adventures. During a residency at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York, Ritiu needed a boulder massive enough to hammer large sheets of copper. Someone directed him to a 15-ton rock that construction workers had unearthed in Bushwick. “It was my first week in New York,” he recalls. “I went there in flip-flops and short pants and told these heavy construction workers, ‘I want this rock.’” They laughed. After he showed them photos of his work, they hauled it to the sculpture park, where it became his anvil for the summer.
Today, Ritiu is applying that same improvisational approach on an increasingly ambitious scale. Earlier this year, his sculpture Cosmic Stump entered the permanent collection of Antwerp’s Middelheim Museum. He’s building a beautiful new studio in a former factory in Antwerp while preparing a six-meter-tall outdoor sculpture for Objects With Narratives, which will inaugurate the gallery’s new space in the city this October.
