VIENNA — A couple of years in the past, I encountered a surprising 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 dimension: 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 maintaining heat — the concept of the physique politic, of some form of commonality, had abruptly taken on visible kind.
In Wurm’s present retrospective on the Albertina Trendy, slapstick and absurdity emerge as potent methods for socio-critical remark. 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 offered — home items akin to plungers or plastic bottles — to enact an ephemeral work based on 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 girl 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 — think of the ethical and mental acrobatics a society performs to maintain up appearances. Uncomfortably for some contributors who start in jest and discover themselves abruptly on show, the works invert the connection between viewer and art work; of their dynamic between seeing and being seen, they pose questions of private accountability and visibility.
Wurm’s profession additionally encompasses large-scale sculpture and structure; “Slender Home,” an in depth reproduction of the artist’s childhood house, drastically shrinks the width of what’s in any other case scaled 1:1. Initially in-built 2010 and reconfigured in numerous iterations since, it affords 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 “Fats Convertible” (2005), conflate the sculptural and social to criticize political apathy and consumerist compulsions, whereas “College,” constructed to a smaller-than-human scale and requiring that we stoop to enter its slim inside, invokes the violence of institutional indoctrination and normativity. Alternatively, works such because the Melting Homes sculpture collection — 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 top of political and financial buildings typically 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 customers throw out every year, 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. Massive-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, encompass not more than an outer shell and communicate of absence, a former presence, and the fragility and temporality of our existence.
Erwin Wurm: A Seventieth-Birthday Retrospective continues at Albertina Trendy (Karlsplatz 5, Vienna, Austria) via March 9, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Antonia Hoerschelmann with Assistant Curator Lydia Eder.