Artists Erwin Wurm, whose multidisciplinary works push representations of the body through lenses both funny and grotesque, and Brigitte Kowanz, whose works explore the visual forms of light, will represent Austria at the 2017 Venice Biennale. This is not the first time Wurm will show at Venice: in 2011 he exhibited Narrow House, 2010, an installation of a small cottage with a hedge and path, abutting the Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti.
Said Jeffrey Kastner in a January 2011 Artforum review on Wurm’s debut at Lehmann Maupin, “…the artist, like all comedians, is most effective when his clowning opens up onto larger existential questions.”
In an October 2015 Artforum review, Brigitte Huck called Kowanz “A high priestess of lucidity.” Throughout her career she “has long been interested in the relation between technology and perception, in light as information and experience, and in the interaction of light, space, and time.”
