Erwin Wurm, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, Germany

17 October 2009 – 31 January 2010
Curated by Helmut Friedel

When Erwin Wurm takes a form from the inexhaustible evidence of the objective and makes it the subject of his sculpture, it becomes something else and from then on it carries a further, special meaning. He has "treated" cars, potatoes, cucumbers, clothing in his sculptures, twisting their meaning and thus creating new images. In One Minute Sculptures he transforms apparently banal situations, gestures or actions into forms of expression of a "solidified time". Simply enduring a gesture for over a minute illustrates meanings that are lost in the speed of the "normal" process.

Photographs help to capture the three-dimensional situations and condense them into images. Something similar can happen in films: a man stands motionless from sunrise to sunset and thus becomes a sculpture through the duration captured, more solid, more constant than the sun, which draws its arc during this time. Under the sculptor's sharp, even ironic gaze, cars become "slanted" objects by bending, leaning sideways, leaning against the wall, or, as can be seen in the film, driving up house walls and inverting the vertical and horizontal.

The exhibition aims to demonstrate the diverse use of "sculpture" in an undivided juxtaposition of the means of expression that Wurm has developed, particularly in the last seven years. In addition to the aforementioned plastic forms, these also include texts, simple sentences and statements that express populist ideas in a striking way. Wurm sees these sayings as a form of "social sculpture" that contains contradiction. 

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