World’s Biggest Art Review: 7 Critics Cover 20 New York Gallery Shows
Erwin Wurm at Lehmann Maupin
By: Benjamin Sutton
Never one to take himself too seriously, you can’t help but wish that the Austrian artist had gone the extra mile and legally changed his last name to “Worm” so as to be in keeping with the incredible number of sausages, bratwursts, wieners, and other assorted phallic things that he has cast in bronze and acrylic to create the sculptures in his new show. Giggle-inducing works like Head (Abstract Sculptures), Step (Abstract Sculptures), and Kiss (Abstract Sculptures) (all 2013) are exactly the type of thing Giuseppe Arcimboldo might have made, if he’d been a New York City hot dog vendor. Though not as hilarious, the non-sausage works in “Synesthesa” are similarly adept at aping the forms and proportions of classical sculpture all the while subverting them to comic effect.