Misconceivable

The Erwin Wurm exhibition, Misconceivable, immediately brings smiles to people’s faces. Employing humour and wit, Wurm turns the world on its head, questioning our conventional understanding of objects and concepts. The concocted word serving as its title, right away places the exhibition somewhere between understanding and misunderstanding. Erwin Wurm has his own unprecedented way of working with sculpture. His self-portrait, for example, consists of 30 pickled gherkins on 30 pedestals. Besides the fact that the sight of the many gherkins is incomparable, the artist succeeds, at an ironic distance, in exposing male self-image and bringing it under discussion. A similar strategy is at work in a Renault bent out of shape – amusingly, but helplessly deprived of its function.

To Erwin Wurm, sculpture is a medium that allows him to work with volume, mass and form, and in this way discuss current issues such as cultural values, social norms, politics and identity. Many of his works take familiar things such as buildings, design, cars and fashion as their point of departure. When he twists and turns, expands or shrinks well-known objects, he is at the same time turning the identity of modern man upside down.

Erwin Wurm (b. 1954, Bruck an der Mur/Styria, Austria; lives and works in Vienna and Limberg, Austria) is an Austrian artist whose practice has radically expanded the possibilities of sculpture over the past four decades. Rooted in conceptual questions about what sculpture can be, how it can occupy space, and how the body, everyday objects, and gestures might become sculptural forms, Wurm’s work challenges conventional definitions of the medium. While his oeuvre is filled with larger-than-life-size pickles, anthropomorphic sausages, empty suits, and impossibly proportioned houses, Wurm is best known for his iconic One Minute Sculptures, which provide instructions for participants to create temporary sculptures by performing illogical poses with everyday objects. Through his paradoxical work, Wurm confronts philosophical questions about contemporary society—from obsessions with status and consumerism, to anxieties around traditional value systems, to the complexities of modern psychology. At the same time, the artist explores new possibilities for sculpture through ambitious formal experiments with volume, surface, scale, and duration. While Wurm considers the absurd an important tool, there is always an underlying social critique of contemporary culture. Wurm emphasizes this dichotomy by working within the liminal space between high and low and merging genres to explore what he views as an invented reality.