From Terra to Verde: Art for Art's Sake 2012

From Terra to Nova is an insanely creepy yet beautiful exhibition by artist Sharon Kopriva I saw over the weekend at Art for Art's Sake.  I'm not sure I've seen anything like it...ever.  Her sculptures look like living mummies.  Decaying bodies that were somehow frozen in time.  The stuff you would discover in an old church that had been sealed up for 1,000 years.   I'm not exactly sure how to describe it, but I loved it.  I was fascinated by it.  You should just check it out yourself.  It's happening right now over at the Ogden.  For real, check it out.

Maybe this explains it better, taken directly from the Odgen’s website:

“From Terra to Verde is a thirty year survey of works created between 1982 and 2012 by Houston artist, Sharon Kopriva. Born into a Catholic family in the Houston Heights in 1948, she received a Master of Fine Art in Painting from the University of Houston in 1981. In 1982, she traveled to Peru, where she encountered the open burial grounds and mummified bodies of the ancient pre-Columbian Nazca culture. It was a defining moment in her life and art.

Over the next thirty years, Kopriva’s work has explored issues of faith and doubt, life and death, primitive culture, historic events and contemporary society. Working in an imagist style, she conveys her personal spiritual journey through sculptures, drawings, paintings and installations. Moving from the earth-tones of her early expressionistic landscapes and mummies to more recent magical realist depictions of forests-as-cathedrals, this exhibition reveals the breadth and unity of her career.”

Enjoy!