Anyone who has ever decried the seasonal phenomenon we call fall knows how quickly nature can transition from verdant greenery to bare branches. The same goes for missed waterings for neglected houseplants: Skip a week and witness the edges brown and curl into a crisp. Once these natural changes occur, so do their remedies or failures, and it doesn’t take long before we’re discovering new shoots or depositing evidence of our neglect in our compost bins.
For Álvaro Urbano, the brief period between boom and bust is worth preserving. He sculpts common plants from metal, casting fragile life forms into solid materials and rendering their colors and textures with paint. It’s the act of “making small monuments out of things that normally disappear or change in a matter of days or minutes,” the artist said.
Drawing from theater and architecture, Urbano is interested not only in creating independent works but also in creating immersive scenes. His sculptures often leave traces of leaves on the floor or appear to grow directly from the bare gallery walls, their knotted branches reaching into the space. “Viewers can enter these scenes as if they were witnesses to a scene that has already begun,” the artist added.
Urbano lives and works between Paris and Berlin, and has exhibited the latter’s work in the Spore Initiative. Find more information on Instagram.
