Samurai & Zorro, Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, Austria

31 August – 17 November 2012

Modelled on existing buildings of European and American architecture, they were first formed in clay, then attacked in various ways—the artist punched or kicked them, hit them with his elbows or crushed them with his own body weight by lying or sitting on them.

Some of the buildings chosen by the artist are well-known, others anonymous, some selected for personal reasons. The maltreated models include prisons, warehouses, a psychiatric clinic, bunkers, as well as Wurm's parental home and the house belonging to his ex-wife. The Narrenturm (madhouse tower) in Vienna bears footprints, San Quentin State Prison has been slashed open, and Alcatraz has a hole, dug out by hand, which might just as well have been made by a violent explosion.

In this group of works, violence is very much to the fore. The marks of destruction are preserved through being cast in bronze, acrylic or even polyester, and refined by silver- or gold-plating. The buildings have a closed surface area; neither windows nor doors allow a view of the interior. The cladding is the important feature, as in the artist's earlier sculptures, where the form was determined by garments on plinths.

The artist made the models first out of clay, only to ruin their perfect form in a wide variety of ways. There is something playful yet compulsive in this process of creation and destruction, and of preservation and thus re-creation of form. The deformation gives the works the amorphous character that has made his style iconic, but in a quite different way; it is not through inflating or narrowing, or any other distortion of the scale, but through destruction, that the works get out of the norm and off balance. The marks and impressions of this gesture still, however, remain clearly visible, as for example the trouser seams on a stereotype American farmhouse which the artist sat on. 

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