Surrogates 
15 February – 14 April 2024

It’s very simple: we are bodies first, though we consist of mental qualities and spiritual qualities and psychological qualities… And the body is our first measure of relation to the rest of the world.
— Erwin Wurm

Thaddaeus Ropac London presents Surrogates, an exhibition of new sculptures by Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, including three series of works shown for the first time: Paradise, Mind Bubbles and Dreamers. On view concurrently with the artist’s major institutional survey at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield, the exhibition features painted metal and epoxy resin sculptures, alongside key developments in the continuation of his iconic One Minute Sculptures. Together, the works assembled embody Wurm’s characteristically expansive approach to the concept of sculpture as he disrupts traditional distinctions between subject and object, the human and the non-human, spectator and participant.

As is characteristic of Wurm’s practice and encapsulated in the exhibition title, Surrogates, this idea of substitution acts as a social commentary that cuts through the artist’s often humorous treatment of the objects and rituals of everyday life. He conceives of the disembodied Substitutes as a way to call attention to the role of the individual in the rapidly changing social, political and environmental conditions of the contemporary world, and particularly the potential absence of humanity in post-anthropocentric futures. As Max Hollein, art historian and director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has said of Wurm, ‘he has succeeded in conveying to a large audience, in a hugely suggestive way, the tragedy of its own social condition.’ With the Substitutes, the absurd becomes a tool through which Wurm asks us, in his own words, to ‘look at the world from a different perspective’ and take ‘paradoxical angles’ to imagine parallel realities and alternative ways of being.

Addressing another aspect of the human condition, the Dreamers and Mind Bubbles (both 2024) give form to psychological thought through bodily associations. ‘Turning our reality upside down’ through his absurd fusion of bodies and pillows, Wurm evokes the writing of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and The Interpretation of Dreams (1899).

These new series of works are presented alongside a group of the artist’s One Minute Sculptures, which epitomise his innovative approach to time-based, participatory sculpture. Begun in 1996–97, they consist of written or drawn instructions that are typically performed by individuals on a plinth for up to one minute. Often incorporating everyday objects, they transform the visitor from spectator into participant, destabilising traditional modes of engaging with art. Installed in Ely House, what Wurm describes as a ‘new chapter’ of the One Minute Sculptures marks a key evolution in the series. Abstract sculptural elements are introduced to each work, which remain present even when they are not activated by a participant. Giving the works new life outside the temporal duration of their performance, this development demonstrates Wurm’s enduring impetus towards artistic evolution, which he has sustained throughout his long and successful artmaking career.

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