On the rise: Ser Serpas

Ser Serpas finds freedom in discarded objects. There’s something liberating, says the artist, about making art out of materials that ‘are considered to be trash or have already been used.’ Contained within a fusty old mattress, a broken mirror, or a defunct bathtub is not only creative potential, but life itself. ‘I’m attracted to things that are distressed. It comes down to taste – like wearing torn jeans.’ 

We’re chatting over Zoom, Serpas from the studio space she’s currently working out of in POUSH, an artist community on the fringes of Paris. Since graduating from Columbia University in New York, she’s lived in Zurich, Geneva, and Tbilisi. ‘I first became interested in assemblage at the end of my undergrad studies in 2016, when I was working with discarded fabric, twisting and stretching it around sturdier objects like metal baskets and chairs,’ she tells me. ‘Then I moved on to furniture, driving around cities and collecting things from the streets, laying it all out like a checkerboard, according to palette, then combining it. The act of making is a choreographed performance, of which the assemblage is the aftermath.’

Serpas’s ephemeral installations (with nothing fixed in place, it could all come crashing down any minute) comprise sculpture, painting, performance, and poetry. Some poems become artworks in themselves, as with Alice (Language) Practice 20 (2021), a series of inky texts on paper; others either feed into her titles or are read as part of a live performance, for example in Crumbling World Runway (2017). Her bodily portraits – which at Art Basel Miami Beach were draped limply over wooden sawhorses – are faceless, fragmented, and tightly cropped. Like her found objects, these painted nude body parts have their own history and energy, and hint at life and death. ‘I don’t explore anything overly personal in my art, but I’d like to be able to look back at what I’ve done in 20 years and think about it as a reflection of my own life,’ says the artist of her ever-evolving practice. ‘A family album-type thing. A timeline. Something that, when I’m making work that’s radically different in the future, tells me where I was at.’

Ser Serpas is represented by Karma International, Zurich; Balice Hertling, Paris; and LC Queisser, Tbilisi.

Chloë Ashby is an author and arts journalist based in London. Her first novel, Wet Paint, was published in April 2022. 

Caption for full-bleed images:
Installation view of Ser Serpas’s exhibition ‘Monakhos’ at LC Queisser, Tbilisi, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and LC Queisser, Tbilisi.
Installation view of Ser Serpas’s exhibition ‘HEAD BANGER BOOGIE’ at Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Barbara Weiss, Berlin.