Keep a Cool Head
20 October 2006 – 11 February 2007

Curated by Edelbert Köb

In a permanent exchange of questions and answers about what sculpture is and how it is constituted, Erwin Wurm has worked for more than twenty five years on a many layered body of work that can be understood as a long term study of sculpture as a concept. For Wurm, one of the most successful contemporary artists, anything can become sculpture: actions, written or drawn instructions, or even a thought. The exhibition shows with more than 400 drawings, videos, photographs, and sculptures, the most expansive show of the artist's work to date.

His most recent prominent work, visible from afar, is House Attack, installed on MUMOK's external facade: the single family house as a symbol of the everyday, privacy, as well as small-mindedness explodes like a bomb into the facade of the museum—the institutionalized museum temple. In its visual presence House Attack represents an ambivalent metaphoric exemplary for the current work of the artist.

The idea for House Attack emerged while planning the MUMOK retrospective. House Attack is a single-family house that crashes into the roof of the museum, a house like one that might be built at Blaue Laguene, a prefab housing development in southern Vienna. A symbol for conservative, small-minded longings, the single-family house collides into the museum as an temple to the muses, and the museum itself now also becomes part of the sculpture. House Attack confuses our perception of art and everyday reality and in its striking appearance and humorous, dramatic staging of the banal is a perfect example of current developments in the artist's work.