VIENNA — A couple of years in the past, I encountered a shocking set up by Austrian artist Erwin Wurm at Kunsthaus Graz, a pink wall of knitted wool stretched to 130 by 1300 ft, dotted with sparse particulars scaled to human measurement: limply hanging sleeves, random buttonholes, and openings for the top. In a world that’s feeling colder and colder, Wurm’s mammoth sweater appeared like a proposal for retaining heat — the concept of the physique politic, of some sort of commonality, had abruptly taken on visible kind.
In Wurm’s present retrospective on the Albertina Fashionable, slapstick and absurdity emerge as potent methods for socio-critical statement. His One Minute Sculptures, as an example, are performative items that undermine the very notion of sculpture as a everlasting artwork kind and invite the viewer to make use of the props supplied — home items comparable to plungers or plastic bottles — to enact an ephemeral work in line with the artist’s directions. Wurm has usually mentioned that he’s not a humorist, and certainly, the silliness of the poses appears to camouflage a cultural and historic pessimism during which the actors’ contortions — a lady balancing a bucket on her head, as an example, or a person with pens, a stapler, and movie canisters stuffed into his mouth, nostrils, ears, and eye sockets — recall to mind the ethical and mental acrobatics a society performs to maintain up appearances. Uncomfortably for some members who start in jest and discover themselves abruptly on show, the works invert the connection between viewer and paintings; of their dynamic between seeing and being seen, they pose questions of non-public accountability and visibility.
Erwin Wurm, “One Minute Sculpture,” enacted in Vienna on October 24, 2024
Wurm’s profession additionally encompasses large-scale sculpture and structure; “Narrow House,” an in depth duplicate of the artist’s childhood residence, drastically shrinks the width of what’s in any other case scaled 1:1. Initially inbuilt 2010 and reconfigured in numerous iterations since, it provides a surreal picture of the constricting norms of household, class, political perception, gender, and faith, and reminds us of the resilience required to flee them. Different main works, such because the puffy “Fat Convertible” (2005), conflate the sculptural and social to criticize political apathy and consumerist compulsions, whereas “School,” constructed to a smaller-than-human scale and requiring that we stoop to enter its slender inside, invokes the violence of institutional indoctrination and normativity. Then again, works such because the Melting Homes sculpture sequence — amongst them Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Constructing and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim — collapse in a shapeless mass of liquefying matter, imagining the tip of political and financial buildings usually thought of indestructible, together with capitalism.
Wurm’s use of clothes as a sculptural materials calls to thoughts the excesses of the style business and the 92 million tons of clothes shoppers throw out annually, whereas its mirror picture, the landscapes of discarded clothes left behind by refugees in flight, casts the privileged world’s fears, anxieties, apprehension, and dread into sharp reduction. Giant-scale works collectively titled Skins reiterate Wurm’s recurrent theme: The vulnerability of the human physique and its interplay in social house. The sculptures, slices of clothed our bodies folded over on themselves, include not more than an outer shell and converse of absence, a former presence, and the fragility and temporality of our existence.
Erwin Wurm, “Guggenheim Melting” (2005)
Erwin Wurm, “Narrow School,” inside element (2010–ongoing)
Erwin Wurm, set up view of works from the sequence Surrogates. Left: “Repentance (After Donatello)” (2023); foreground: “Ghost” (2022); proper: “Hoodie I” (2023) 
Erwin Wurm, sculpture: work from the sequence Skins (2022–24); wall: “Blob” (2021), oil on canvas
Erwin Wurm: A Seventieth-Birthday Retrospective continues at Albertina Fashionable (Karlsplatz 5, Vienna, Austria) by means of March 9, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Antonia Hoerschelmann with Assistant Curator Lydia Eder.
