Patricia Low is delighted to present a solo exhibition of works by renowned Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, partly coinciding with a career-spanning retrospective at the Albertina Modern in Vienna. Best-known for his One Minute Sculptures, for which viewers are engaged in creating surreal, fleeting works of art with ordinary items, Wurm‘s third solo show at the gallery comprises work spanning almost 15 years of production, united by a long-held inquiry into the meaning of sculpture. The oldest, Cajetan (2009), named for the Italian theologian, harks back to some of Wurm‘s earliest experiments into sculptural form via the wearing and removing of clothes: a headless male figure stands at ease, fleshed out by a collection of smart-casual attire. The artist’s interest in inflating and distorting the proportions of the human body, and with different forms of consumption – whether food or luxury items – is seen in other works characteristic of his wider practice. A bulbous “fat” car in deep blue Murano glass boasts comically engorged contours; a polished bronze sausage is anthropomorphised with arms and feet; and a quilted handbag perches atop a pair of elongated legs, replacing the torso. Rodin’s Coat (2023), a sombre meditation on sculptor Auguste Rodin‘s monument to French author Honoré de Balzac, and eerily absent of the body, is cast in patinated bronze at 65 cm. Pink (2023), at 65 cm too in painted aluminium, recalls the artist’s fascination with pullovers as a membrane for creating and adumbrating form: a headless female figure in a pink skirt stands in the process of donning a pullover in the same bubblegum hue, stretching it out to atypical proportions.
The exhibition also includes four examples of Wurm‘s more recent “flat sculptures“, which he began in 2020. Wurm famously wanted to be a painter but was rerouted to a sculpture class instead. Just as his practice asks questions of sculpture – of time, surface, mass and volume – so too do these new works ask questions of painting, re-positioning the canvas as a flat sculptural work. Realised in oil and acrylic on canvas, the pieces appear initially abstract, featuring amorphous shapes punctuated by quantities of colour. Closer inspection reveals these to be interstices between inflated letters that together spell out the titles of the works, which in turn call to mind some of the items and processes present in Wurm‘s work overall: Wurst, Weight, Melt. The letters comprising Wurst (2021) even look like the items they together describe, in a kind of visual onomatopoeia. As with all of the artist’s work, these pieces press at the limits of visual literacy, inviting fresh perspectives on everyday language and forms.
Erwin Wurm (b. 1954 in Bruck an der Mur, Austria) lives and works in Vienna and Limberg, Austria. Wurm studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts in Austria and has been exhibited extensively in private and public galleries around the world since. His work is held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Tate, London; Kunsthaus Zürich; Albertina, Vienna; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others. In 2023, he held his first museum solo show in the UK at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and in 2017 represented Austria alongside Brigitte Kowanz at the Venice Biennale. In September 2024, the Albertina Modern in Vienna will be holding a career survey in celebration of Wurm‘s 70th birthday.
