Forging speculative environments with Marius Ritiu's hammered copper sculptures

Objects With Narratives presented My Boat is Bent, This Stairway Leads to Heaven, and I Swing on Meteoric Dreams, a solo exhibition by Antwerp-based contemporary artist Marius Ritiu at Antwerp Art Weekend this year. Bringing together three large-scale installations made in hand-hammered copper, the exhibition unfolded as a “speculative environment where gravity seems negotiable and matter remembers having been something else in a previous galaxy”, Objects With Narratives shared in an official release.

At the centre of the design exhibition, in collaboration with Wolf Food Market, were three sculptural forms that resisted fixed interpretation. Rather than illustrating a narrative, the sculptures appeared as fragments of an unfolding story—objects that appeared to have arrived from elsewhere, carrying traces of unknown histories and possibilities. “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 design gallery explained.

The second sculpture took the form of an ascending structure reminiscent of a stairway. Refusing gravity’s logic, it appeared to climb toward an undefined destination, dissolving gradually into space. “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 contemporary design gallery notes.

“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,” they add.

The third sculpture introduced a sense of suspension and movement. Arcing like a swing caught in orbit, it occupied the threshold 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,” the gallery explained.

Together, the three sculptures established a terrain in which monumentality becomes unstable and the absurd acquires a precision. “The exhibition 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,” Objects With Narratives states in the show’s description.