Erwin Wurm: Dreamers

Erwin Wurm’s practice is built on a radical expansion of what sculpture can be. Working since the late 1970s, he has consistently questioned notions of time, mass, surface, abstraction, and representation – using clothing, everyday objects, and the human body itself as sculptural material. His “One Minute Sculptures”, begun in 1996–97, brought him international recognition: the artist provides instructions for poses or actions to be performed with ordinary objects producing ephemeral sculptures that dissolve the boundary between artwork and everyday life, and between viewer and participant.

The body is central throughout his work, whether literally or metaphorically, as in works that anthropomorphise everyday objects by adding legs to bags, contorting sausage-like abstract forms, or inflating the volume of cars and houses. Wurm treats weight gain and loss as sculptural gestures, creating illusions of bodily growth and shrinkage that carry both comic and philosophical weight. Humour is a consistent instrument, but one through which essential psychological, social, and philosophical questions are posed. Running through the work is a critique of contemporary society explored from within the liminal space between high and low culture, in what Wurm himself describes as a farcical and invented reality.