“My work addresses the drama of existential indifference. Whether approaching it through philosophy or diet, one inevitably ends up getting the worst of it.”
For more than two decades, the Austrian action and installation artist Erwin Wurm (b.1954) has astonished a wide international audience with his absurd and paradox sculptural interventions in public spaces. During the 1990s, he attracted much attention with his One Minute Sculptures, which encouraged viewers to interact with everyday objects such as chairs, clothes, or detergents in absurd positions, thereby becoming part of the performative-sculptural installation themselves. Other sensational works by the artist include his full-scale, zany elongated, crooked, and distorted houses, ships, and cars, mobilising a twisted and satirical view of bourgeois status symbols.
Erwin Wurm’s works often apply a simple pictorial language taken from popular culture, indicating broad, easy, and playful accessibility. Yet, as satirical artistic ‘pitfalls,’ the works surprise the audience with an alternative and, at times, cynical focus on everyday banalities and our constantly blurred sense of reality.
Erwin Wurm lives and works in Vienna and Limberg/Lower Austria. His art, rich in facets, has been shown at countless respected exhibition venues across the world and he represented Austria at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.
The exhibition at Museum Jorn presents a selection of spectacular installations, providing a glimpse into the humorous and subtle aesthetic universe of Erwin Wurm.
View more information on the Museum Jorn’s website.