Andra Ursuta at Deste Foundation Hydra Island, Greece

At DESTE Foundation Hydra, Andra Ursuța fabricates a history we want to believe, even as we know it’s a lie. On view through Oct 31, 2025.

Andra Ursuța: Apocalypse Now and Then – Hydra’s Ruins That Never Were

Every summer on Hydra Island, Greece, begins the same way: the first glimpse of Jeff Koons’ Apollo perched at the Project Space Slaughterhouse, catching the light as the ferry pulls in.

Andra Ursuța, “Apocalypse Now and Then,” installation view at DESTE Foundation Project Space (Slaughterhouse), Hydra, Greece, 2025—translucent cast-glass and colorful mixed-media sculptures on concrete-block plinths, sea visible through open doors — **Andra Ursuța**, *Apocalypse Now and Then* — installation view at DESTE Foundation Project Space (The Slaughterhouse), Hydra, Greece, 2025. Translucent cast-glass and polychrome, mixed-media bodies on concrete-block plinths sharpen the show’s tension between beauty, brutality, and myth. *Image courtesy of Munchies Art Club.*

DESTE Foundation Project Space (Slaughterhouse), Hydra—installation view of Andra Ursuța’s “Apocalypse Now and Then,” 2025: translucent glass torso and colorful mixed-media figure on block plinths, rough concrete walls, sea visible through open doorway. — **DESTE Foundation Project Space — Hydra (The Slaughterhouse).** Installation view of **Andra Ursuța’s** solo exhibition *Apocalypse Now and Then*, 2025. Cast glass, bronze, and mixed-media figures face the sea, turning the island abattoir into a charged, archaeological stage. *Image courtesy of Munchies Art Club.*

It’s always there to the left, a quiet announcement that the season has begun.

“Some ruins tell the truth. These ones tell the story we want to believe.”

A few days in, once the island’s slow rhythm has taken hold, breakfast with friends in the port, the murmur of tourists and locals, the steady clip of donkey hooves, we make the familiar pilgrimage along the water to the DESTE Foundation’s Project Space in the scorching heat.

Path from Hydra port to DESTE Foundation Project Space (Slaughterhouse) with Jeff Koons’s “Apollo” wind spinner beside the sea, stone walls and power lines, late July evening on Hydra Island, Greece. — **DESTE Foundation — Hydra:** The sun-face **“Apollo” wind spinner by Jeff Koons** marks the approach to the **Slaughterhouse**. A summer ritual, port to exhibition, with cicadas as soundtrack, before stepping into **Andra Ursuța’s** show. *Image courtesy of Munchies Art Club.*

The path curves past sun-bleached walls and low stone outcrops, leading to where the sea opens wide.

There, the Slaughterhouse stands apart from the bustling port, promising the unexpected in its silence.

Entrance of DESTE Foundation Project Space (Slaughterhouse), Hydra—Jeff Koons’s Apollo wind spinner above stone wall, Andra Ursuța’s scythe-like wall piece at right, glass sculpture visible through doorway, 2025. — **Andra Ursuța,** **Apocalypse Now and Then** — arrival view at **DESTE Foundation Project Space (Slaughterhouse), Hydra**, 2025. At the entrance, a wall-mounted, scythe-like work and, through the doorway, a glimpse of a cast-glass figure set the tone, while **Jeff Koons’s** **Apollo** **wind spinner** watches from above. *Image courtesy of Munchies Art Club.*

This year, the promise arrives in the form of Apocalypse Now and Then, the first major Greek exhibition by Romanian-born, New York–based artist Andra Ursuța (David Zwirner).

But the relics she offers are not of the past, they’re from a civilization that never existed, already in ruin before it could be remembered.

**Andra Ursuța,** **Apocalypse Now and Then** — exterior installations at the **DESTE Foundation Project Space (Slaughterhouse), Hydra**, 2025. Artifact-like bronzes, cast glass, and copper objects occupy the outdoor bays, echoing survival, ritual, and the body-as-relic. *Image courtesy of Munchies Art Club.*

Inside, the transformation is complete. The whitewashed interior is now a site of fictional archaeology, each object positioned with the gravity of museum display.

Bronze, glass, and composite forms stand like survivors of an invented history: weathered amphorae, fractured torsos, and strange votive figures whose patina feels centuries deep.

They are credible. They are beautiful. And they are lies.

Rust-streaked interior wall at DESTE Slaughterhouse, Hydra, with five wall-hung vessel sculptures by Andra Ursuța—breast/udder-like bronze jugs with polychrome, ceramic-style patina—from “Apocalypse Now and Then,” 2025. — **Andra Ursuța,** **Apocalypse Now and Then**, wall-hung vessels from the **“Desolation Ware”** series at **DESTE Foundation Project Space (Slaughterhouse), Hydra**, 2025. Faux-historicist jugs with breast/udder motifs, lost-wax cast in bronze with ceramic-like patina, turn archaeology into a dark, bodily reliquary. *Image courtesy of Munchies Art Club.*

Ursuța draws from the authority of archaeology, mimicking the careful lighting, the reverent spacing, and the faux-weathered surfaces of historical artefacts.

Yet each work is an act of fabrication, a deliberate collision between minimal conceptual precision and an almost theatrical sense of decay.

These aren’t ruins preserved from collapse; they are collapses built to seduce.

Her Desolation Ware series, on view here, embraces the contradictions of craft and deception. In one corner, a bronze jug sprouts strange anatomical bulges, half vessel and half body.

**DESTE Foundation — Hydra:** Inside the Slaughterhouse, **Andra Ursuța’s** votive-like containers hang like finds in an archaeological store, zoomorphic, domestic, and grotesque at once, bridging mythology, design, and dystopian ritual. From the **“Desolation Ware”** series. *Image courtesy of Munchies Art Club.*

Elsewhere, a seat-like form hovers between medieval torture device and ornate furniture, a work that seems to hold the memory of bodies without revealing their story. A Gorgon’s head emerges from a modern helmet, its snakes coiled in a frozen snarl.

In translucent resin, fragmented female torsos stand on stark white plinths, their arms raised in a frozen gesture that is both triumphant and defensive.

**Andra Ursuța,** **Apocalypse Now and Then** — interior view at **DESTE Foundation Project Space (Slaughterhouse), Hydra**, 2025. A polychrome cast-glass figure rises on block plinths while a local cat lounges like an unbothered guard, Hydra’s daily life quietly witnessing the show and (left) wall-hung vessel—jug meets body, ceramic-look patina over bronze, set against the Slaughterhouse’s raw concrete *Image courtesy of Munchies Art Club.*

Light from the tall industrial windows slices across their surfaces, turning the space into a living sundial.

Against the rough stone walls, smaller works hang like relics scavenged from a shipwreck, weathered pots fused with organic forms, their surfaces rich with false erosion.

Walking through, you become complicit in the fiction. You want to believe these objects are survivors from some lost Mediterranean empire.

**Andra Ursuța,** **Apocalypse Now and Then** — cast-glass figures catch the late light inside the **DESTE Foundation Project Space (Slaughterhouse), Hydra**, with the Mediterranean shimmering just beyond the open door. Color-swirled bodies on block plinths turn the room into a luminous reliquary. *Image courtesy of Munchies Art Club.*

You want to imagine the ceremonies they belonged to, the hands that shaped them, the centuries that scarred them.

Ursuțan understands this desire. Her practice critiques the way museums and cultural heritage sites construct authority, and how audiences willingly surrender to it.

The patina of age, the language of preservation, the authority of the display case, these are tools of persuasion. In Apocalypse Now and Then, they become tools of invention.

**Andra Ursuța,** **Apocalypse Now and Then** — a milky cast-glass figure fuses a classical torso with upraised, plastic-bottle–like arms, bridging myth and the present. A standout work that reads like archaeology of the future—antiquity meeting ocean waste and climate anxiety inside the Slaughterhouse, Hydra, 2025. *Image courtesy of Munchies Art Club*

The show also engages with art-historical misunderstandings, like the persistent myth that ancient sculpture was purely white marble, when in reality it was richly polychrome.

Ursuța takes these distortions and uses them as generative forces, crafting objects that inhabit the gap between truth and desire.

DESTE Foundation Project Space (Slaughterhouse), Hydra Island, Greece—coastal path beside stone building topped by Jeff Koons’s “Apollo” sun sculpture, evening light over the Saronic Gulf, farewell view after Andra Ursuța’s 2025 exhibition. — **DESTE Foundation Project Space (Slaughterhouse), Hydra**, Jeff Koons’s sun-faced **Apollo** watches the Saronic Gulf as we say goodbye to **Andra Ursuța’s** 2025 show. Already wondering who **DESTE** and **Dakis Joannou** will invite for summer **2026**, see you back on Hydra. *Image courtesy of Munchies Art Club.*

On Hydra, the effect is heightened. The island itself is layered with histories, real, rewritten, and imagined.

The Slaughterhouse has long been a space where contemporary art collides with this charged backdrop, and Ursuța’s installation feels inevitable here, like a ruin revealed at low tide.