Currents 125: Blas Isasi

Peruvian sculptor Blas Isasi creates carefully crafted sculptures in a wide range of materials and colors informed by ancient Andean cosmology and the landscape of the Peruvian desert. This exhibition focuses on the violent meeting between two radically different world views—those of the Indigenous Andean and the colonizing Europeans—in early 16th-century Peru.

Currents 125 offers a meditated interrogation of Peru’s complex and layered history. Isasi does not romanticize Andean culture but rather suggests that it might offer alternative models for a troubled present. The exhibition’s central installation consists of two large, angular steel sculptures animated by rocklike shapes coated with sand; carved bones with hair extensions; and small, highly detailed, and colorful forms. The installation embodies the cultural hybridity resulting from the encounter between Andean and European cultures. The presence of hair and bone, with their sacred meanings in Andean culture, suggests that objects can be vessels for spirits. The second space features a Chincha balance from the Saint Louis Art Museum’s collection, which was used to weigh objects in a pre-Hispanic barter economy. It is surrounded by sandstone sculptures with aluminum foil pieces, which resemble Andean metal artifacts and, again, suggest a spiritual presence. Across the gallery is another scale; on one side are mutilated aluminum fingers, embodying colonial violence and on the other is a balancing weight of one kilogram, a reference to the metric system as an archetypal symbol of science in the Western enlightenment.

Isasi is a Peruvian sculptor who currently resides in North Carolina, where he is an assistant professor of 3D foundations for the College of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Isasi was the recipient of the 2024–25 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Fellowship, which included a residency at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and this exhibition.

Currents 125: Blas Isasi is curated by Simon Kelly, SLAM’s curator of modern and contemporary art. This presentation is generously supported in part by the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Endowment Fund.