Erwin Wurm, MKM Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg, Germany

7 July – 3 September 2017
Curated by Jörg Mascherrek

With Erwin Wurm (born 1954), the MKM Museum Küppersmühle and the Lehmbruck Museum are presenting one of the most important sculptors of our time. In a comprehensive overview exhibition, the two Duisburg Art Museums are jointly showing sculptures, photographs, wallpaper, knitted objects, videos, the famous One Minute Sculptures and some works created especially for the exhibition by the Austrian artist, who is currently representing his home country at the 57th Venice Biennale.

At the MKM, Erwin Wurm has made 90 meters of wall disappear under bright green knitted fabric. The result is a fascinating, monumental work of art that has never existed before and combines classic sculptural questions about body and object, volume and emptiness with a huge, brightly colored wool surface.

Appearing like painting from a distance, the work is also reminiscent of color field painting, as it developed in America from the mid-1950s onwards. In order to even begin to grasp the work, the viewer must walk through five exhibition rooms.

Working with daily materials and tools has always been one of the central components of the Austrian artist's work. Sweaters become wall sculptures, an oversized boxing glove bears tire tracks, watermelons apparently kill a trader at the market. People are often included in this process. 

The sculptures, photographs, murals, textile pieces and spatial installations combine to illustrate one thing: Wurm is celebrating chaos as a creative strategy. Transgressing boundaries with both humour and profundity, Wurm raises our expectations ad absurdum, and, in so doing, re-defines contemporary sculpture.

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