LΓ‘ura Viruly
South Africa
LΓ‘ura Viruly (b. 1997, Johannesburg) is a Cape Town-based sculptress working primarily in forged and formed aluminium, alongside installation. She completed her Master of Fine Art with distinction at the University of Cape Town in 2025.
Through labour-intensive techniques of beating aluminium over existing serial and decorative objects, Viruly creates hollow sculptural replicas that question how value is accumulated, transformed, or eroded through replication. Her sculptures search for a pathos at the point where imitation begins to fail, allowing the veil of spectacle to lift. Employing copying as both a material process and critical methodology, she exposes the cultural feedback loops through which certain images acquire authority over others, while questioning the power structures that privilege authenticity over imitation.
This methodology developed through her research into South African sites of fantasyβfrom roadside attractions to casinos to monuments, churches, malls, and childhood heterotopiasβwhere she examines how colonial aesthetics, consumer spectacle, and inherited myths continue to shape desire, belief and proximity to affluence. Her work reveals fantasy not simply as an aesthetic, but as a symbolic machinery operating through repetition, abundance, enclosure, and the tension between authenticity and artifice, inviting viewers to look critically at the systems through which spectacle produces belief.
Viruly has exhibited throughout South Africa, including at the National Arts Festival, Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Kalashnikovv Gallery, WORLDART, and kumalo | turpin. In 2026, she completed the Tankwa Artscape Residency in the Karoo. Alongside her studio practice, she is the founder and creative director of Via Wax Atelier.
Through labour-intensive techniques of beating aluminium over existing serial and decorative objects, Viruly creates hollow sculptural replicas that question how value is accumulated, transformed, or eroded through replication. Her sculptures search for a pathos at the point where imitation begins to fail, allowing the veil of spectacle to lift. Employing copying as both a material process and critical methodology, she exposes the cultural feedback loops through which certain images acquire authority over others, while questioning the power structures that privilege authenticity over imitation.
This methodology developed through her research into South African sites of fantasyβfrom roadside attractions to casinos to monuments, churches, malls, and childhood heterotopiasβwhere she examines how colonial aesthetics, consumer spectacle, and inherited myths continue to shape desire, belief and proximity to affluence. Her work reveals fantasy not simply as an aesthetic, but as a symbolic machinery operating through repetition, abundance, enclosure, and the tension between authenticity and artifice, inviting viewers to look critically at the systems through which spectacle produces belief.
Viruly has exhibited throughout South Africa, including at the National Arts Festival, Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Kalashnikovv Gallery, WORLDART, and kumalo | turpin. In 2026, she completed the Tankwa Artscape Residency in the Karoo. Alongside her studio practice, she is the founder and creative director of Via Wax Atelier.
Artworks
