{"title":"Solo Show Marius Ritiu","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"arachne-marius-ritiu","title":"Arachne","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eArachne\u003c\/i\u003e, Marius Ritiu shapes copper into something that feels midway between a creature and a relic, poised in a fragile, almost improbable balance. Four elongated, tapering legs descend like drawn threads, uneven and trembling, carrying a small, angular body that resembles both a vessel and a fragment of something once whole. The surface is restless, marked by hammer blows that read like a coded language of pressure and release. Though abstract, the sculpture unmistakably echoes the myth of Arachne, evoking a presence that is less seen than sensed, as if the figure has just emerged from its own act of making.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe copper itself becomes a kind of skin that records time, its oxidized tones shifting between ash, ember, and shadow. There is a quiet tension between delicacy and endurance: the legs appear almost too thin to bear weight, yet they hold, insisting on their own precarious logic. The upper form, part seat, part carapace, suggests both shelter and exposure, inviting the viewer into a subtle unease. In this work, Ritiu transforms the ancient narrative of weaving into a sculptural condition — not threads crossing, but forces stretching, thinning, and holding the world together by the narrowest of margins.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Studio Marius Ritiu","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47724750897486,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0601\/6928\/9981\/files\/arachne15_3b6b5d46-8dcb-458f-8248-68bdcfa3e8c0.jpg?v=1774909244"},{"product_id":"meteor-throne-marius-ritiu","title":"Meteor Throne","description":"\u003cp\u003eRising like a fragment torn from the sky and cooled mid-fall, \u003ci\u003eMeteor Throne\u003c\/i\u003e occupies a strange territory between impact and invitation. Its hand-hammered copper surface bears a restless topography — scorched, folded, and cratered as if shaped by forces more celestial than human. Light moves across it like a slow-burning ember, catching on ridges and dissolving into darker, oxidized depths.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThough unmistakably sculptural, the work carries a latent function: it is a throne, a place to sit, to inhabit. Yet this is no passive seat. To rest upon it feels almost ceremonial, as if one were momentarily assuming the role of a witness to cosmic time. The body meets a surface that resists smoothness, insisting instead on presence, weight, and awareness.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn Meteor Throne, copper becomes both relic and conduit — a material that remembers touch, heat, and transformation. What emerges is an object that feels unearthed rather than made, balancing between artefact and apparition, utility and myth.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Studio Marius Ritiu","offers":[{"title":"Copper \/ Belgium","offer_id":55192350916942,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true},{"title":"Copper \/ Romania","offer_id":55192351801678,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0601\/6928\/9981\/files\/L_Appartement-MariusRitiu-repros-JulienGremaud-013R-HD-web_ca520512-0dae-4aad-abb0-9140b8c6084d.jpg?v=1780242106"},{"product_id":"stairway-to-heaven-ii-marius-ritiu","title":"Stairway to Heaven II","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eStairway to Heaven II\u003c\/i\u003e by Marius Ritiu is a monumental sculpture in hand-hammered copper that explores the tension between raw materiality and transcendence. Emerging from a dark, meteor-like mass, a luminous staircase is revealed from within, suggesting both excavation and ascent. The work evokes the impression of a fractured monolith whose interior carries an unexpected warmth and radiance.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThrough the physical intensity of hammered copper, Ritiu transforms metal into a surface that appears simultaneously geological and alive. The rough exterior contrasts with the glowing architectural core, creating a dialogue between brutality and refinement, darkness and illumination. The staircase functions as both structure and symbol — a passage toward elevation, transformation, and the persistent human impulse to search for meaning beyond the physical world.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Studio Marius Ritiu","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":59587191275854,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0601\/6928\/9981\/files\/M9A6173.jpg?v=1778688848"},{"product_id":"the-global-citizen-marius-ritiu","title":"The Global Citizen","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Global Citizen\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA vertical constellation of copper forms: twelve pentagons, each marked with mysterious reliefs, as if bearing the memory of lost civilizations or celestial diagrams. They hover one beneath another like fragments of a broken code. And yet there is a secret geometry hidden within them: if these twelve pieces were ever reunited, their edges would close perfectly into a single solid — a dodecahedron, the ancient shape that philosophers once believed described the structure of the cosmos itself. One begins to imagine that this was once a game the gods played — separating the universe into pieces, scattering them through space, and leaving them hanging here in quiet suspension, waiting for some future intelligence to understand how the cosmos was folded apart.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEach pentagon is made out of hand carved wood from Maramureș, Romania (the artist’s country of origin) covered with hammered Belgian copper plates (the artist’s adoptive country). Among these plates are vintage pieces like the one bearing the portrait of Peter Paul Rubens, its surface glowing with time’s patina, its ornamental border curling like a baroque whisper. The artist collected around one hundred such copper plates from flea markets across Belgium over the course of a single year, gathering them like scattered echoes of domestic histories — objects once decorative, now reassembled into a new cosmology.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe carved wood was collected from Maramureș, Romania, a UNESCO-protected region praised for its unique carved wooden houses and churches. Over the years, furniture companies depleted the region of some of these houses, demolishing them and exporting the wood to be used for expensive flooring. The artist spent several months collecting found carved and uncarved wood remnants from these demolitions. In his studio in Antwerp, he assembled the wood into pentagons, carving the plain surfaces himself using pre-Christian symbols found on the original pieces. Thus, the twelve resulting pentagons carry a layered language: part inherited, part reimagined.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy using these two materials, each deeply rooted in the traditions and histories of their respective countries, the artist creates a dialogue that feels less like fusion and more like a quiet alignment — two cultural gravities finding balance without dissolving into one another, forming instead a richer, orbiting whole.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Studio Marius Ritiu","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":59587326673230,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0601\/6928\/9981\/files\/M9A6402_ac9ba32d-20e5-4c15-997e-294e60a1b510.jpg?v=1780242140"},{"product_id":"my-boat-is-bent-marius-ritiu","title":"My Boat is Bent","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eMy Boat is Bent\u003c\/i\u003e appears less as a functional vessel than as a relic from an unknown trajectory — an object seemingly fallen from space, carrying the scars of an impossible journey. Hand hammered in copper, its distorted canoe form evokes both an archaeological fragment and a cosmic survivor, suspended between ruin and arrival.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe sculpture embraces absurdity through contradiction: a boat that can no longer float, a vehicle of passage rendered immobile, a familiar object transformed into something alien and enigmatic. Its elongated body seems warped by forces beyond the human scale, as though exposed to atmospheric burn, impact, or the immense pressure of interstellar travel. The hammered copper surface records these imagined collisions, preserving every dent and irregularity like traces of a voyage through time and void.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBalancing monumentality with vulnerability, My Boat is Bent becomes a meditation on existential drift — a solitary form navigating the uncertainty between destination and catastrophe. It stands as both wreckage and witness: an absurd vessel for a cosmic journey that may never have had a clear beginning or end.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Studio Marius Ritiu","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":59587361702222,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0601\/6928\/9981\/files\/M9A6358_725ae982-8fa7-4a78-805a-9658d24bc351.jpg?v=1780242672"},{"product_id":"go-with-the-flood-marius-ritiu","title":"Go With the Flood","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eGo With the Flood\u003c\/i\u003e transforms the surfboard — an object associated with balance, movement, and leisure — into something uncanny and extraterrestrial. Hand hammered in copper and suspended like a specimen or celestial remnant, the sculpture appears less shaped by waves than by collision, heat, and atmospheric descent. It carries the presence of a meteorite fallen from space: scarred, oxidized, and mysteriously intact after an impossible voyage.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe work embraces absurdity through displacement. A surfboard without water, a vehicle without direction, an artifact seemingly detached from any coherent function or narrative. Its rough blue-black patina evokes cosmic debris or the burned surface of an object drifting through unknown dimensions before arriving abruptly within the white neutrality of the gallery space.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHovering between relic and spacecraft fragment, Go With the Flood suggests a form of existential navigation — surrendering not to the ocean, but to forces far larger and less comprehensible. The title itself becomes paradoxical: the “flood” may no longer be terrestrial, but cosmic — a tide of matter, time, and uncertainty through which the sculpture continues its silent drift.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Studio Marius Ritiu","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":59587372679502,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0601\/6928\/9981\/files\/M9A6376_835d2b03-adad-4044-b657-39984f005215.jpg?v=1780243141"}],"url":"https:\/\/objectswithnarratives.com\/collections\/solo-show-marius-ritiu.oembed","provider":"Objects With Narratives","version":"1.0","type":"link"}