Lehmann Maupin Seoul presents Dream, an exhibition of new and recent work by Austrian artist Erwin Wurm. Best known for his sculptures, which include human-sized pickles, a house compressed to just one meter wide, and his iconic, participatory One Minute Sculptures, Wurm has examined the fundamental tenets of the medium for over 25 years. Confronting expectations about what sculpture can or should be, the artist explores intriguing new possibilities for the medium through investigations into volume, mass, surface, color, and time. His latest exhibition with Lehmann Maupin brings together work from many notable series, including his bronze sausages and anthropomorphized handbags, as well as new Skins sculptures and Flat Sculptures paintings.

Wurm’s Flat Sculptures, which he began in 2021, marks the latest evolution in the artist’s experiments with sculpture’s formal qualities. In this series Wurm takes the idea of flattening volume to an extreme, creating “flat sculptures” with paint on canvas. For each composition he selects a single word relating to other series or sculptural concerns (such as “brot,” “weight,”or “mold”) and expands it to fill the entire picture plane, ballooning and distorting the text almost past recognition. Rendered in pastel pink, light blue, or electric chartreuse—all signature colors in Wurm’s palette—the paintings navigate a narrow border between representation and abstraction, reflecting Wurm’s recent interest in moving away from figuration.