19 February – 23 March 2019
Can I use the idea of the sculptural to process everyday life and our time to gain a new perspective or a new possibility for interpretation?
–Erwin Wurm
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac London presents Erwin Wurm: New Work, the largest solo exhibition in the UK to date of works by the Austrian artist (b.1954), who has expanded conceptions of sculpture and the human form over the last thirty years. Erwin Wurm’s sustained interest in the varied intersections of the physical and psychological runs through all five bodies of work in the exhibition, at times manifested in a sense of the surreal or absurd. His new ceramics abstract individual body parts, which take on new meaning when seen in isolation, subverting our perception of these objects in their altered forms. The One Minute Sculptures capture the sculptural potential of the human body and bring the dimension of time and impermanence into this traditionally spatial and permanent form. In Wurm’s Stone sculptures, the weighty mass of a moss-covered stone stands in for the body, perched atop legs that exhibit different characteristics – whether clad in bellbottoms, barefoot, or booted – hinting at a distinct personality. The Fat Mini, a racing-green Mini Cooper, addresses the West’s bloated fascination with mass consumption, the fattened, anthropomorphic automobile satirically confronting our value system.
Exploring the connection between psychological states and the physicality of the human form, Wurm challenges traditional sculptural representations of the body. Abstracted body parts—ears, lips, noses, fingers and navels—have seemingly escaped their bodily restraints to take on a life of their own as individual entities. Each work features an isolated body part and, by extension, its associated means of sensory perception. Fingers represent the sense of touch, ears symbolise hearing, and noses suggest the sense of smell, each coated in textural glazes of white, purple or fleshy pink. A number of these are placed on unique ceramic plinths, such as Double Navel, which sits upon a cabinet-shaped pedestal, or Peace Restrained, a skyward-pointing finger atop a footstool. These attenuated forms remain in a precarious state of distortion, as if poised between creation and dissolution. The deconstruction of the body separates form and function, while prompting a heightened bodily and sensory awareness in the viewer.
Over the course of his career, Wurm has radically expanded conceptions of sculpture, space and the human form, through his ephemeral, participatory One Minute Sculptures, which, as the title describes, exist for moments before they dissipate. The viewer is instructed to interact with everyday objects such as fruit, furniture, cleaning products, buckets or shoes in a prescribed way. “My instructions are given in a relatively strict form and the viewer should adhere to them, otherwise it will become something different—not one of my sculptures.” The participant’s action or interaction is documented for posterity in photographs, drawings and videos, the boundaries between performance and daily life blurred and the roles of viewer and participant or subject and object conflated.
Wurm likens the intensive work on his drawings to a diary, in which he sketches himself and his family, as well as artists, writers, conductors or cultural figures who interest him. His aim is not portraiture but rather an exploration of facial topographies or the psychological states of his subjects – as in the drawings of smokers that relate to an asthma attack he experienced on an island – or formal considerations such as the effects of enlarged heads, distorted facial features or geometric bodies. Of his self-portraits, Wurm explains “I draw myself because I’m an easy victim. I’m not recognisable and I don’t have any vanities about how I appear.”
When Wurm began making his Fat Cars in 2001, he looked to cars that stood as icons for their country of origin, such as the Italian Ferrari and German Porsche, to construct a critique of the greedy consumer habits of the rich. The 1960s Mini Cooper that Wurm has selected for this work is a quintessentially British car. In its modern form the Mini has been remodelled as an enlarged version of the modest original, which is taken to extremes in his Fat Mini, with its flabby mass obscuring the iconic shape.
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