From The Excess Issue
As he celebrates his 70th anniversary this year at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the internationally renowned sculptor and multifaceted artist unveils an exclusive series of collages from the new One Minute Sculptures, which refers to Samuel Beckett's oeuvre, How It Is (After Samuel Beckett).
In Erwin Wurm’s universe, individuals lack faces, pickles resemble humanoids, sculptures are soft, cars are fat, houses are compressed and one piece lasts one minute. Since the early '90s, the Viennese artist has relentlessly pushed the boundaries of art with a unique, almost metaphysical vision. Over the decades, his prolific and experimental work skillfully navigates the realms of sculpture, performance, painting, photography, and even video, all with a sharp, acidic, and inimitable perspective. His approach ? Distorting reality to question it through new kinds of ready-mades. Until March 2025, the Albertina Museum presents the first complete retrospective of his work. Step into Erwin Wurm’s alternative dimension.
More is More: Metaphysics of the Century
Whether drawing inspiration from the prose of Jean Genet, Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett, or from his youth in Bruck an der Mur, amid the picturesque Austrian countryside, Erwin Wurm thrives on seizing the paradoxes of daily life to twist them. In 2019, the Narrow House, presented in Le Havre, delves into the artist’s intimacy through a reconstruction of his childhood home—with one detail. The ultra-compressed structure measures 20 meters long and 1.10 meters wide, immersing viewers in the post-war Austrian society where the artist grew up, which he critiques for its rigid and narrow existence. In contrast, the gleaming, distorted Fat Car reveals the excess of an ultra-consumerist world ruled by Big Money, with a critique that perhaps it’s better to laugh than cry. Humor is omnipresent in his work, as seen in a 2010 sculpture at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac—a cloud resting on a balancing arm, simply titled Me on LSD.
One-minute with Claudia Schiffer
This painter and sculptor, trained at the Academy of Vienna, does not adhere to conventional rules. In his work, the essential interacts with the trivial, gravity becomes laughable, and the incongruity of reality is illustrated in a dizzying void. His early sculptures—the Dust Sculptures—were primarily composed of dust, leaving ephemeral imprints. Clothing, a recurring motif, often appears sculpted as empty shells, mere bodily envelopes that are layered or stretched. Distortion, always and forever. With his iconic One Minute Sculptures concept, in which he invites the viewer to briefly embody an object or a situation, Erwin Wurm goes further, questioning whether a sculpture can become an everyday object. This exercise is repeated with audiences around the world. He is even featured in Vogue Germany in 2009, where top model Claudia Schiffer strikes increasingly incongruous poses before the amused lens of Erwin Wurm.
How It Is
With the collage series unveiled in this issue of Exhibition Magazine,
Erwin Wurm continues his exploration of the absurd, drawing inspiration from Samuel Beckett’s book How It Is. “I feel connected to this book. He describes the situation of continuously walking in deep mud, I like to think of this as a symbol of our present”, explains the artist from his Austrian studio. “For many years, my method has been to look at our world and reality from the perspective of the absurd and often of the paradox. Through this, I realize we are able to see a different reality and we might end up questioning ourselves and our time.” Once again, Erwin Wurm elevates our perspective, mimicking the mechanisms of a world dominated by excess and paradoxes, of a Homo capitalisticus in search of meaning.
Erwin Wurm - A 70th-Birthday Retrospective, Albertina Modern, Karlsplatz 5, 1010 Wien, until March 2025.
