Erwin Wurm

(1954)

Biography

The artist was born in 1954 in Bruck an der Mur, Austria. E. Wurm studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts in Austria. In the 80s the artist gained international recognition and has since exhibited in institutions like the Musee d'Art Contemporain in Lyon, France, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Vienna, the Centre Pompidou in Paris among numerous others. Including the latter, his works are held in private and public collections such as Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Hungary, the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in New York, USA and many others. E. Wurm has been awarded many grants and prizes which include the Grand Austrian State Prize for Visual Arts (2013). He currently lives and works in Vienna and New York.

Style

Erwin Wurm is a multidisciplinary artist who primarily focuses on sculpture and installations. Most widely known for his One Minute Sculptures he has been working on since the late 1980s. E. Wurm creates participatory experiences that question the validity, creation of sculpture, its connection to its context by taking everyday objects and instructing them to be interacted with in a specific way. These satirical, humorous and revealing pieces challenge traditional forms and push them towards distortion in temporal experiences. Reworking mundane objects into new suggestive forms, the sculptor fiercely critiques the postmodern consumer society and contemporary culture with a darkly comical gaze, such as the sculpture Fat Car (2001), where a distorted, puffed-up life size automobile merges the technological and the biological systems into a satirical wink at consumer culture. “Many artists are good at making the easy difficult. I’m interested in making the difficult easy. That does not necessarily mean making it light in a stupid way. I’m not speaking about the surface. I’m speaking about the content” says E. Wurm.