Exhibitions — VERA KOX

TITLE

Bird in Kitchen

DATES

March 25, 2026 - May 09, 2026

LOCATION

IMHMV, Luxembourg

PHOTOS

Tun Bisdorff

Things are not always what they seem, nor do they always appear as what they are. Perhaps this was what Constantin Brâncuși had in mind when his work Bird in Space was stopped at U.S. customs in 1926. In this sculpture, rather than reproducing a bird’s features, he stripped most of them away, arriving at a light, streamlined form that focused on the idea of upward movement over literal likeness. When the work crossed the Atlantic to be exhibited in a New York gallery, it was held at the border. After opening the crate, the customs officers, cosplaying as art critics, concluded, with bureaucratic confidence, that the object in front of them was not a work of art. According to their standards, a sculpture had to resemble something recognisable, and this one didn’t. It was too smooth, too abstract, not a bird, not art, perhaps something industrial, and therefore taxable. The ‘specialist’ symposium ended with a reclassification: the work was registered as a utilitarian object, placed—somewhat absurdly—in the category “Kitchen Utensils and Hospital Supplies,” and taxed accordingly.

Bird in Kitchen by Vera Kox takes this sense of disjunction as its starting point. The title already sets up a shift in meaning, foregrounding misplacement, transformation, and the role of interpretation. A bird in the kitchen is certainly not the same as a bird in the sky: if the latter suggests an idea of freedom and life, the former introduces a sense of intrusion, confinement, and even danger, as here the animal runs the risk of becoming an ingredient, with its identity reorganised according to where the knife lands. Moreover, in certain registers, “bird” can be slang for “woman”, folding the kitchen back into its long-standing gendered connotations. It is within this site marked by intimacy, ambiguity, and latent violence that Vera Kox inserts a selection of recent works, displacing them from the controlled environment of the studio into a context where meaning is less stable and matter is always on the verge of transformation.

This instability, already embedded in the title, becomes material in the kitchen. Here, unlike in customs offices, things are transformed beyond their mere status. In cooking, materials are not merely reassigned; they are decisively altered. As Claude Lévi-Strauss argues, cooking is one of the primary ways cultures structure the world, marking the transition from nature into culture. The culinary triangle of the raw, the cooked, and the rotten maps these modes of transformation as a system of relations. The kitchen operates through this logic: some elements remain still, purely decorative; others serve as inert yet functional tools, while others are subjected to change through heat or preserved through cold.

Departing from the kitchen’s internal divisions of temperature, Vera Kox arranges her works, mapping the space as a micro-landscape structured by heat, cold, humidity, and time. Her pieces, which often draw on inhospitable terrains shaped by extreme climates and unique geological formations, are here positioned in relation to similar conditions within the kitchen, as if each were somehow calibrated to its own microclimate.

] Instar [ (2023), for example, finds refuge in the “keep warm” drawer under the oven, echoing the extreme heat of the Dallol desert in Ethiopia, the landscape that inspired the piece. The kitchen thus operates as a reduced planetary model, where multiple climates intersect and continuously transform what they contain. In the series Viscera and Ichorous, drawing on the landscape of Spitzbergen and its melting glaciers, the works are placed within the cooling zones of the kitchen, their titles invoking bruised, internalised bodies which, in this exhibition, are held on ice, suspended between preservation and decay. In the series …into deliquescence (2021), this process becomes more explicit, as form appears to loosen, the material seemingly melting away, gradually losing its structure across the kitchen shelves.

If freezing is a process of preservation, cooking is a controlled process of change, and in this sense, it closely resembles the transformation of clay. Soft and malleable at first, clay records touch and gesture, but once exposed to heat, it finds a solid and final form. As it is frequent in the practice of Vera Kox, most of the works in clay in this exhibition seem to share an appetite for ambiguity. They draw on textures from the natural world—mineral formations, dried layers of earth, ruptures, stratifications—while also evoking industrial surfaces and geometric patterns. Through her unique treatment of clay, the material is always pushed towards different states. Whether her references are natural or artificial, soft or mineral, these sculptures remain difficult to place. In the kitchen, this ambiguity inherent in the works seems to become more pronounced, as some pieces do not immediately declare themselves as such; their presence emerges through attention, curiosity, and encounter. What appears functional may be sculptural; what seems inert may be in process; what looks familiar may be entirely displaced.

If Brâncuși’s “bird” was mistaken for a kitchen object, Kox returns the gesture by placing the “bird” in the kitchen. In this space, where matter is constantly reclassified and transformed, works mobilise misrecognition as a method, collapsing distinctions and exposing their instability. In doing so, they land two birds with one stone: dismantling the authority of appearances while demonstrating how context, whether institutional or domestic, quietly but decisively frames how we allow things to be.

Mattia Tosti