Must-See: Lulù Nuti Steps Into the Wild

This review is part of a series of Must-See shows, in which a writer delivers a snapshot of a current exhibition

One early morning at the end of March, five sculptures appeared on the east quay of Rome’s Tiber Island. Made from organic materials including bread, seeds and blue food pigment, the works were shaped like classical architectonic elements ubiquitous in Rome, including arches, beams and pyramids. Titled I Fruitori (2025), they were conceived by Lulù Nuti, a Rome-based multi-disciplinary artist known for her mesmerising sculptures that combine plaster, metal and natural material. 

Over three days and nights, the ephemeral works were exposed to the elements and the island’s fauna, undergoing a beguiling metamorphosis. Transformed by animal pecks and nibbles, rain and wind, they were subsequently cast in fibreglass, and now form a key part of ‘Tre corpi’ (Three Bodies), Nuti’s inaugural exhibition at the newly opened Fondazione d’ARC in Rome. The show sees the artist experiment with new materials such as fibreglass and stainless steel, exploring sculpted bodies and their interaction with space.

Nuti often combines techniques – forging, sculpting, polishing or leaving materials raw – to allow multiple states to exist within a single form, thus investigating dualities such as fragility and resistance, rupture and solidity. In Hysteria (2025), a large, abstract homage to Louise Bourgeois’s Arch of Hysteria (1993), two stainless steel arches interlock at an angle through a ring-shaped joint, forming a four-legged creature whose extremities dramatize this material tension: on one end, the legs are tapered into perfect, sharp tips, on the other, they unfurl into organic forms resembling leaves or wings.

With I Fruitori, Nuti also probed the question: what happens to art in the absence of a human audience, when nature and animals become its users and, ultimately, its creators? Small cameras embedded in the sculptures documented the urban wildlife – the island footage was later projected onto the gallery’s walls. In Nuti’s deft hands, the fibreglass casts of the original bread sculptures become vessels of memory: their brass frameworks revealing where the bread had been eaten away by the birds, insects and mice.

At Fondazione d’ARC, a former concrete factory located at the base of a tuff cliff, concealing a vast Roman domus, Nuti’s creations speak to the city’s layered past. They also ask us to reckon with a likely future: one in which humans are gone and nature reclaims itself.

Lulù Nuti’s ‘Tre corpi’ is on view at Fondazione d’ARC, Rome, until 29 July

_{Main image: Lulù Nuti,I Fruitori, 2025, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and Studio Ozono; photograph: Eleonora Cerri Pecorella}