Erwin Wurm: The Three-Dimensional Paradox

Vienna,

Seventy years after his birth in the Austrian city of Bruck an der Mur, the Albertina in Vienna has dedicated its most extensive retrospective to Erwin Wurm to him to date: a review of his multifaceted work made up of sculptures, drawings, performance instructions, videos and photographs that invite us to reflect on the paradoxes and absurdities present in the functioning of society.

The basis of Wurm’s creative method is the examination of the concept of sculpture, which he uses as a criterion to measure, to understand, the contemporary world, from a social perspective but also questioning the distances between this language of sculpture and the theoretical codes of performance, photography or painting; he is also interested in redefining along the way the ways of perceiving the dynamic and the static in a work of art. His projects aim to challenge the viewer, inviting him to ask himself what happens if he ignores gravity, what would happen if the unexpected emerged (our homes were crushed or melted), how bodies and objects behave when the absurd penetrates them or, in the case of his works, how they behave when the absurd penetrates them. One Minute Sculptureswhat it would be like to be part of an artistic piece for a moment. He has invited us to contemplate pickles as self-portraits, convertibles as an emblem of our greed and fetishism or a very narrow house as a conceptual reflection of the narrowness of certain ways of thinking and the restrictions derived from some social norms.

In his new creations, Wurm continues to approach the notions of mass, skin, volume and time from sculptural parameters: at the Albertina we will see the series Substitutes, in which the body disappears and the clothes remain as a ghostly relic of a previous presence; Skinswhich brings together narrow corporeal ribbons that, like spatial drawings, become the echo of a sculptural movement; or its Flat Sculpturesin which flattened and scattered letters conquer three-dimensional canvases, making the words they give rise to difficult for us to read. In projects like this, Wurm, who once wanted to become a painter, persists in his constant exploration of color and language but, as the title of the series suggests, he still breaks with tradition by making such painting an entirely spatial experience, rather than just two-dimensional. His production illustrates the extent to which contemporary creation can be interpreted as a rediscovery, a field in which to continually rethink and redesign existing art.

Erwin Wurm. Hoody I, 2023. Photography: Markus Gradwohl

In Vienna we will be able to see everything from his early sculptures, made of wood and dust, to his latest pieces, some of which have never been seen before, as well as those proposals from his mature period, which have been repeatedly exhibited internationally, which we have mentioned: One Minute Sculpturesin which he induces the public to adopt unexpected postures in front of everyday objects, sometimes deformed or distorted, as a way of questioning the value and use of clothing, furniture and other consumer goods in Western society; Fat Carthat luxury vehicle turned into a commodity of greed, and Narrow Housea faithful reconstruction of his parents’ house, reducing its width to just over a metre. As the viewer enters the house and walks through it, he or she will experience – as Wurm intends – restrictions that are a metaphor for those of a closed or provincial mentality.

Seven years ago, we saw the Austrian artist in his country’s Pavilion at the Venice Biennale: his idea was to create a truck arranged vertically, which visitors, who he turned into performers, could access via a staircase. Inside, they were also asked to become sculptures. Although his training was traditional (at the Academy of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, in the late seventies and early eighties), his first raw material, conceptually and physically, has been all the fruits of our daily life and all those objects and themes that explain us collectively, in a political, psychological, material and spiritual sense. From this same transversality he contemplates the different disciplines he uses: from sculpture to performance and photography; the games with distortions and scales are his usual mechanism to involve those who look at his projects, invited to become aware of their participation in the great theatre of the world.