Am I still a House?, Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden – Cragg Foundation, Wuppertal, Germany

11 April – 12 July 2015

Erwin Wurm is currently one of the most successful artists from Austria. The approaches to his work are complex and the forms of expression in his work are correspondingly diverse. In addition to sculptures, his oeuvre includes films, photographs, drawings and performances, whereby he himself states that his aim is to "show everyday life from a different perspective". The motifs of his art are mostly objects from the everyday world. But in the course of the artistic process, his houses, cars, items of clothing and much more are formally alienated or used in unusual ways. A well-known example of this method is his improvised One Minute Sculptures. The artist gives instructions on how to interact with everyday objects. The person carrying out the action becomes a sculpture for a short period of time.

The exhibition Am I Still A House? presents Wurm’s sculptures in the context of the house. Among the exhibits is the walk-in sculpture Fat House from 2004, a full-size country house imbued with a humanlike adiposity. A video within the sculpture shows a computer animation of a soliloquy by the talking house about existential issues. As in the case of Fat House the other exhibits also bafflingly deformed. They are fat and obese, fissured, they melt away or display traces of violent treatment. This alienation is what lends the works their sculptural quality and one’s perception is directed into a nether region where the spontaneous identification with such a banal concept as ‘the house’ comes totally unstuck. Instead, the abstract, formal quality of the object becomes the focal point.    

More on skulpturenpark-waldfrieden.de