Avatar
8 October – 13 November 2022.
Curated by Manfred Möller
Concomitantly with the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia – Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana presents works by Austrian artist Erwin Wurm in its historic Sale Monumentali, accessible from the Museo Correr directly on Piazza San Marco in Venice. In a solo exhibition entitled Avatar, Wurm's sculptural works are placed in dialogue with wall and ceiling paintings by Tiziano, Tintoretto and Veronese. The exhibition is curated by Manfred Möller and promoted and organized by Association for Art in Public Dirk Geuer.
Erwin Wurm, born in 1954 in Bruck an der Mur in Styria, is the leading figure of Austrian contemporary art on an international level. His work, which is multilayered in meaning and at the same time humorous and profound, encompasses almost all genres and ranges from material sculpture to action art, from video to photography, from drawing to artist's books. Recently, with the so-called Flat Sculptures, paintings were also created for the first time. At the heart of his artistic work, however, is his predilection for the medium of sculpture. Ever since his student days, he has questioned genre categorizations, their terminology and the associated conventions, dissolving their spatial and temporal boundaries and constantly developing new, innovative but above all independent possibilities of expression.
Erwin Wurm often deals with objects that are part of our everyday life, but which usually receive little attention. Well known in this context are Wurm's fat sculptures, which show the petty-bourgeois status symbol through “fattened” and bloated cars, refrigerators or family homes.
On the occasion of Avatars Erwin Wurm presents a new group of works entitled Skins. In contrast to the fat sculptures, these works focus on the reduction of volume. In the filigree and fragile-looking sculptures, up to 4 meters high, bodies dressed in jeans, shirts and sneakers are depicted schematically and in detail in various poses, which the viewer can only perceive from a certain angle.
As rudimentary and abstract as the sculptures may seem, the reference to Erwin Wurm's One Minute Sculptures, with which the artist made himself known to the general public from the early 1990s, is obvious. In this case, Wurm had people pose with everyday objects and briefly assume unusual and often unnatural body positions, which take shape in the works Skins. The One Minute Sculptures wanted to question the categorization of subject and object, but also to create an antithesis to classical sculpture, generally associated with permanence. The artist focuses on the concept of surface and its function of containing and defining the volume of the sculptural body. On a plane between presence and absence, Wurm refers in these works to existential questions regarding our interaction with the world around us and the role of the skin as a contact surface for this encounter.
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