VIENNA — A number of years in the past, I encountered a shocking set up by Austrian artist Erwin Wurm at Kunsthaus Graz, a pink wall of knitted wool stretched to 130 by 1300 toes, dotted with sparse particulars scaled to human measurement: limply hanging sleeves, random buttonholes, and openings for the pinnacle. In a world that’s feeling colder and colder, Wurm’s mammoth sweater appeared like a proposal for protecting heat — the concept of the physique politic, of some form of commonality, had immediately taken on visible kind.
In Wurm’s present retrospective on the Albertina Trendy, slapstick and absurdity emerge as potent methods for socio-critical commentary. His One Minute Sculptures, for example, are performative items that undermine the very notion of sculpture as a everlasting artwork kind and invite the viewer to make use of the props offered — home goods similar to plungers or plastic bottles — to enact an ephemeral work in line with the artist’s directions. Wurm has typically stated that he’s not a humorist, and certainly, the silliness of the poses appears to camouflage a cultural and historic pessimism through which the actors’ contortions — a lady balancing a bucket on her head, for example, or a person with pens, a stapler, and movie canisters stuffed into his mouth, nostrils, ears, and eye sockets — think of the ethical and mental acrobatics a society performs to maintain up appearances. Uncomfortably for some contributors who start in jest and discover themselves immediately on show, the works invert the connection between viewer and paintings; of their dynamic between seeing and being seen, they pose questions of non-public accountability and visibility.
Erwin Wurm, “One Minute Sculpture,” enacted in Vienna on October 24, 2024
Wurm’s profession additionally encompasses large-scale sculpture and structure; “Narrow House,” an in depth duplicate of the artist’s childhood dwelling, drastically shrinks the width of what’s in any other case scaled 1:1. Initially in-built 2010 and reconfigured in varied iterations since, it gives a surreal picture of the constricting norms of household, class, political perception, gender, and faith, and reminds us of the resilience required to flee them. Different main works, such because the puffy “Fat Convertible” (2005), conflate the sculptural and social to criticize political apathy and consumerist compulsions, whereas “School,” constructed to a smaller-than-human scale and requiring that we stoop to enter its slim inside, invokes the violence of institutional indoctrination and normativity. Then again, works such because the Melting Homes sculpture sequence — amongst them Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Constructing and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim — collapse in a shapeless mass of liquefying matter, imagining the top of political and financial constructions usually thought-about indestructible, together with capitalism.
Wurm’s use of clothes as a sculptural materials calls to thoughts the excesses of the style business and the 92 million tons of clothes customers throw out annually, whereas its mirror picture, the landscapes of discarded clothes left behind by refugees in flight, casts the privileged world’s fears, anxieties, apprehension, and dread into sharp aid. Massive-scale works collectively titled Skins reiterate Wurm’s recurrent theme: The vulnerability of the human physique and its interplay in social area. The sculptures, slices of clothed our bodies folded over on themselves, encompass not more than an outer shell and converse of absence, a former presence, and the fragility and temporality of our existence.
Erwin Wurm, “Guggenheim Melting” (2005)
Erwin Wurm, “Narrow School,” inside element (2010–ongoing)
Erwin Wurm, set up view of works from the sequence Surrogates. Left: “Repentance (After Donatello)” (2023); foreground: “Ghost” (2022); proper: “Hoodie I” (2023) 
Erwin Wurm, sculpture: work from the sequence Skins (2022–24); wall: “Blob” (2021), oil on canvas
Erwin Wurm: A Seventieth-Birthday Retrospective continues at Albertina Trendy (Karlsplatz 5, Vienna, Austria) by March 9, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Antonia Hoerschelmann with Assistant Curator Lydia Eder.