Láura Viruly (b. 1997, Johannesburg; lives and works in Cape Town) is a sculptor working primarily in forged and formed aluminium, alongside installation and moving image. She completed her Master of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2025, with distinction.
Her practice-led research examines South African sites of ‘fantasy’ where strategies of world-building take material form, from the sacred heterotopias of childhood in Johannesburg to contemporary spaces of consumer spectacle. She is drawn to roadside attractions, light shows, monoliths, mausoleums, circuses, and casinos, studying their playbooks and sculptural grammar of scale, replica, abundance, and illusion. Within these environments, degrading cultural myths and residual colonial symbolic systems are continuously reconstructed through repetition, producing a naturalisation of images through both enchantment and erosion. This research in part is rooted in an autoethnographic approach as a half-Italian, half-Dutch artist born in South Africa. Here, colonial myths (manifested through Greco-Roman and Cape-Dutch aesthetics) still dictate unattainable images of desire.
In response, Viruly creates hollow replicas of recurring motifs and ornamental forms, often using labour-intensive processes of beating aluminium over serial objects. Through this act of copying, the authority of the “original” is gradually destabilised, revealing how myth is sustained through cycles of reproduction and display. Her work navigates a tension between belief and artifice, approaching spectacle as both a technology of enchantment and a structure of exhaustive erosion.
Viruly has exhibited in group exhibitions across South Africa, including at the National Arts Festival, Cape Town Art Fair, and Kalashnikovv Gallery, WorldArt and Kumalo | Turpin. In 2026, she participated in the Tankwa Artscape Residency, where she developed a site-specific installation in the Karoo landscape. Alongside her studio practice, she is the co-founder of Via Wax, an artisanal homeware studio through which she explores wax, fabrication, and collaborative making.
March 20, 2026 OFLUXO
