Nick Ervinck
GNI-RI nov2025: Plants and Alterations
9 November - 13 December 2025
Opening Event: 9 November 2pm - 4pm
Virtual: Gni-ri nov2025: Mano, Virtual Reflection
GNI-RI nov2025: Plants and Alterations
9 November - 13 December 2025
Opening Event: 9 November 2pm - 4pm
Virtual: Gni-ri nov2025: Mano, Virtual Reflection
|
Nick Ervinck explores the dynamic intersections between nature, technology, and human influence, in his GNI-RI nov2025: Plants and Alterations, using sculpture as a medium to question our evolving relationship with the environment. Known for merging virtual reality, digital design, 3D printing, and traditional craftsmanship - Ervinck’s works exist in a liminal space between virtual imagination and material reality. His sculptures unfold as hybrid organisms - half digital, half material.
Ervinck challenges the dichotomy between the real and the digital. By combining hand-painting, gilding, and glazing with digitally generated forms, he brings texture and imperfection to the algorithm. Rather than emphasising artificiality, his work explores the tension and interplay between natural and constructed forms and creation of co-existing multiple realities. His sculptures exist between the synthetic and the organic blurring the boundaries between the two realities. Aelbejark, is a 3D-printed, hand-painted strawberry, part of his Plant Mutation Project, was inspired from a meeting with the plant scientist Dr. A.P.M. Ton den Nijs from the Plant Breeding Department at Wageningen University. The sculpture references genetically modified plants and explores the potential and ethical uncertainties of scientific advancements. The strawberry’s unfamiliar colours of blue and yellow and its mutated form provoke reflection on humanity’s power to reshape nature and the possible consequences of doing so. Ervinck’s Nebkatrobs, mutated cacao beans partially gold-glazed and fleshy texture becomes a symbol of luxury desires, cultural and biological manipulations. These small, hybrid seed and bean-like sculptures, suggest the birth of a new nature: artefacts of speculative botany that merge craft and technology. They represent fragments of growing forms, symbolising the cross-fertilisation between living species that could lead to a thriving new nature emerging from the shadows of our current environmental destruction and social injustice. They posit adaptation and survival in the face of ecological collapse, hinting at a future that straddles evolution and invention. His work bridges the gap between contemporary digital techniques and traditional craftsmanship, as seen in the Akritanot ceramic piece. Inspired by Meissen porcelain and Baroque excess, its plant-like structures are reminiscent of algae or flowers fused into a chaotic order and formed as a mutated ornament. Its skeletal membrane, organic curves, and orifices evoke a dreamlike imagination - a sci-fi laboratory of distorted interlinking species. Alongside the material sculptures at MOCA London, Ervinck has created digital sculptures that exist in a parallel virtual reality of the exhibition space. The two realities coexist, creating an uncanny experience for viewers. The act of engaging with the art becomes a disorienting encounter, where the memory of the exhibition lingers between the physical and digital realms - like fragments of a dream that blur the lines between what was seen and what is remembered. Ervinck’s work challenges us to reconsider the boundaries of reality, nature, and artifice, offering both a warning and a wonder-filled vision of the future. @moca_london www.nickervinck.com @nick_ervinck Ebook Press Release |
Works List:
MOCA London exhibition view |
Biography
NICK ERVINCK (° 1981) graduated in 2003 from the KASK (Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent) with a master's degree in Mixed Media. He then trained in computer modeling, sculpting and working with materials such as polyester, plaster and wood. After teaching at art academies in Tielt, Menen and Kortrijk (2004-2012), he returned to the KASK to spend three years as a visiting professor here. His work consists of large installations, handmade and 3D printed sculptures, ceramics, prints, drawings, light boxes and animated films.
As diverse as this art production may be, above all, he remains fascinated by the "negative space" as he discovered it with classical sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. The finding that a "hole" in matter is such a young idea will probably haunt him for the rest of his life. As a child of his time, he plays a varying game between the physical and virtual world, using both classic and new craftsmanship (computers, 3D printing and milling). From here he explores in his own unique way classical themes such as man (with a focus on his anatomy and the emergence of cyborgs), plants (especially their genetic manipulation), masks and animals, always starting from an (art) historical background that he cuts with contemporary pop and sci-fi culture.
He has received several prizes: Prix Godecharle (2005), The Fortis Young Ones Award (2006), the Provincial Prize for Fine Arts West Flanders (2006) and the Rodenbach Fund Award (2008). In 2013 Ervinck also won the prestigious Merit CODA Award for his art integration IMAGROD
NICK ERVINCK (° 1981) graduated in 2003 from the KASK (Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent) with a master's degree in Mixed Media. He then trained in computer modeling, sculpting and working with materials such as polyester, plaster and wood. After teaching at art academies in Tielt, Menen and Kortrijk (2004-2012), he returned to the KASK to spend three years as a visiting professor here. His work consists of large installations, handmade and 3D printed sculptures, ceramics, prints, drawings, light boxes and animated films.
As diverse as this art production may be, above all, he remains fascinated by the "negative space" as he discovered it with classical sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. The finding that a "hole" in matter is such a young idea will probably haunt him for the rest of his life. As a child of his time, he plays a varying game between the physical and virtual world, using both classic and new craftsmanship (computers, 3D printing and milling). From here he explores in his own unique way classical themes such as man (with a focus on his anatomy and the emergence of cyborgs), plants (especially their genetic manipulation), masks and animals, always starting from an (art) historical background that he cuts with contemporary pop and sci-fi culture.
He has received several prizes: Prix Godecharle (2005), The Fortis Young Ones Award (2006), the Provincial Prize for Fine Arts West Flanders (2006) and the Rodenbach Fund Award (2008). In 2013 Ervinck also won the prestigious Merit CODA Award for his art integration IMAGROD