How It Is, Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga, Latvia 2025
How It Is, Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga, Latvia
2025
13 June – 14 September 2025
Cureted by Mike Ovcharenko
Zuzeum Art Centre is very pleased to present Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm’s first solo show in Latvia. Erwin Wurm (b. 1954, lives and works in Vienna and Limberg) is considered one of the most influential European sculptors of the last few decades. How It Is collects his works from different periods, presenting a unique perspective on the artist’s singular mix of figuration, philosophy, and the absurd.
Armed with a motto of “everything is connected to everything else”, Erwin Wurm thinks of the human body as a malleable, open-ended connector between the organic and the human-made, the perks of consumer culture and the stalemates of consumption.
The title of the show is lifted from Irish author Samuel Beckett’s 1962 novel. The sculpture How It Is (2024) is inspired to one of Beckett's play and it belongs to the series of One Minute Sculptures that Wurm has started in late 1990s. This series offers the audience the possibility to transform themselves into a living sculpture by following the artist’s specific instructions and performing simple exercises with everyday objects. A selection of One Minute Sculptures is complemented by several photographs showing the sculptures in the state of activation.
A number of iconic pieces takes centre stage in the exhibition: Fat Convertible (2005) is Wurm’s famous comment on car culture, where the artist draws the notion of a vehicle as a continuation of the body to its illogical conclusion. The mirrored surface of the sculpture adds an interactive dimension to the work, transforming it into a funhouse.
The show also includes Flat Sculptures, paintings in which words or letters are used like sculptural objects within the pictorial space. The series Attacks (2021–22) can be seen as a performative act, in which the homes of key German philosophers (Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx) are deformed using everyday food products.
The most recent body of work in the show, Substitutes (2024), is a continuation of Wurm’s long standing interest in clothing as a volume that both holds the body and creates a set of meanings for its owner. The monumental scale of Substitutes, made from thin sheets of painted aluminium, presents the garments as having character in themselves, separeted from the wearer’s personality.