Adrien Vasco

Adrien Vasco works out of a shared yard on the Marseille docks, next to a firm that repairs fishing boats. The arrangement is practical rather than romantic: they have the crane, he has the furnace, and the material comes from the same place either way. Vasco casts in aluminium recovered from decommissioned port machinery, winches, fairleads, the housings of pumps that stopped working sometime in the 1980s.

He does not disguise the origin. A cast will carry the pitting of the original, the bolt holes, occasionally a serial number that has survived two meltings. Vasco makes the moulds in sand, which gives a coarse skin, and then leaves the surface alone. The sculptures look like objects that were built for a purpose nobody can quite name any more, which is more or less what they are.

Scale is decided by the crane. Nothing leaves the yard that the crane cannot lift, and the largest works sit at around 1,900 kilograms. Since 2021 he has been making a parallel group of small pieces, cast in a domestic kiln at his apartment, which he calls the evening work. They are handheld and they are the only things he has ever made that a single person can move.

Vasco represented France at the 2019 Venice Biennale. His work is in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Museum Voorlinden and the Kunstmuseum Basel. He joined the gallery in 2016.