Dreamwalkers
19 June – 25 August 2024
Curated by Angela Stief
Throughout his three-decade practice, Erwin Wurm has constantly challenged the definitions of sculpture, the limits of the human form, and our relationship with our living space. “Everything is sculpture,” says Wurm. Wurm began creating his iconic One Minute Sculptures (OMS) series in the 1990s. The series continues to this day. In this series, Wurm issues written or drawn instructions for the participant to strike a certain pose with a range of common objects such as fruit, a water bucket, or a piece of furniture, and to hold that pose for sixty seconds. These temporary, spontaneous, ephemeral body sculptures, with their “burn after reading” feel, subvert the timelessness of traditional sculpture. In the short stretch of “one minute,” the participant’s body engages in a silly, even awkward encounter with Wurm's provided props, alluding to the individual's ceaseless efforts to correct and adapt their relationship with an impenetrable world, which, under Wurm's neurotic orders, appear arbitrary and lacking discipline—these moments of absurdity are the source of the work's charm. In the span of 60 seconds, the viewer becomes a work of art that is viewed, and the strict discursive system of the museum is punctured and dissolved.
At a time when most human-made things, including art, have been striving for a monumental perpetuity, the One Minute Sculptures embody Wurm's resistance against “manufactured reason” and emphasize that sculpture is not just heavy, steady, and static. But in fact, the public's photos of these One Minute Sculptures have already spread like a virus across social media networks. Bizarre interactions are the key to the post-Internet era and its basic language. These infinitely copied and dispersed virtual images are more eternal than any substantive existence. This exhibition will present a trove of Polaroid photographs Wurm shot for the One Minute Sculptures series, a spontaneous archive of folly. The use of Polaroids, with their vintage feel, for documentation, reveals another approach to transforming the fleeting into the eternal.
Erwin Wurm sees clothing as a second skin that serves as the point of contact between the boundaries of the body and the outside world. His 2023 sculpture Rodin’s Coat stems from his Psycho series. The artwork references sculpture Auguste Rodin's study of Balzac in a robe, and appears as a phantom consisting only of a shell and a coat. Wurm asks, in a reality determined by the external, and a society obsessed with superficial appearance, has the internal been swallowed whole by the dominance of the external? In comparison, the giant sweater Lent Cloth, measuring eleven meters long and nearly seven meters wide, immediately softens any serious skepticism, and with an air of the ordinary, strips away the sanctity of the here and now. Muli brand is the exclusive partner for this exhibition, providing strong support for the exhibition under their maxim of “just for the good relationship,” and providing new room for interpretation of Wurm's inversions of internal, external, and reality.
The public space in front of the Fosun Foundation entrance will present a collaboration between Erwin Wurm and century-old fashion house Lanvin, the large-scale sculpture Desire, commissioned for this exhibition. Lanvin's trademark blue and Wurm's penchant for creamy colors are a perfect fit. The body with a handbag for a head and the long legs come together to form a sleepwalker lost in the city, a dreamer out of step with the world. Fosun Foundation has long promoted public art, and Desire is once again placed in the square at the entrance welcoming visitors to the exhibition, in hopes of fostering ever more encounters between the public and art.
By exploring ordinary, everyday decisions and existential questions, Wurm’s creations remind us to pay attention to and engage with everyday life, and to consider how the basic elements and objects of life around us have come to define us. The calm always comes after the storm. Wurm's absurd scenes are simply the creation of another meta reality to use the absurdity of existence against itself. Through this route, the artist has cleverly captured the sore spots of the era, and shown us that beyond solemn deep thought, artists can also create a state of surprise.
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