Exhibition Details

In My Boat Is Bent, This Stairway Leads to Heaven and I Swing on Meteoric Dreams, Marius Ritiu constructs a speculative environment where gravity seems negotiable and matter remembers having been something else in a previous galaxy. At the centre of the space stand three monumental sculptures in hand-hammered copper. They do not illustrate a story. They appear as if they have landed mid-sentence.
The first form resembles a vessel that has survived a cosmic detour. Its curvature makes one think that time itself pressed a thumb into its side. It feels less like a boat meant for water and more like a craft designed to navigate density, memory or the heavy atmosphere of doubt. The copper surface carries the marks of repeated blows, a constellation of gestures that record labour as rhythm. It is both relic and prototype
The second sculpture rises vertically, invoking the promise of ascension. A stairway, perhaps, though not one that obeys architectural logic. It climbs without asking permission from the floor, suggesting that heaven might simply be a change of frequency. The steps seem to dissolve as they rise, turning structure into vibration. In this universe, transcendence is engineered by hand.
The third form arcs through the space with the looseness of a swing suspended in orbit. It captures a moment of suspension, as if caught between launch and return. There is play here, but it is the kind of play that happens on the edge of catastrophe or revelation. The copper glows like condensed sunlight, as though fragments of meteors were melted and reassembled into a dream apparatus.
Together, the three sculptures, showcased during Antwerp Art Weekend this year, establish a terrain where the monumental becomes unstable and the absurd feels strangely precise. Copper, a material historically tied to conductivity and transmission, becomes a carrier of speculative energy. It reflects the viewer back in distorted flashes, turning the audience into passing comets within the installation.
The exhibition, presented in collaboration with Wolf Food Market, reads like a dispatch from a future archaeology. These objects could be remnants of a civilisation that mistook poetry for engineering and built its infrastructure accordingly. Or they could be tools for navigating an interior cosmos, where boats bend under invisible pressure, stairways refuse to end and dreams swing in slow, meteoric arcs.
Here, the absurd is not decorative. It is structural. The works insist that logic is only one possible material among many. In Ritiu’s universe, copper thinks, space wavers and sculpture becomes a vehicle for leaving the ground without ever quite departing.