Erwin Wurm Photographs, MEP (Maison Européenne de la Photographie), Paris, France

04 March – 25 October 2020
Curated by Laurie Hurwitz & Simon Baker

The MEP invites you to discover the work of the internationally acclaimed Austrian artist Erwin Wurm in a totally new light in this first-ever retrospective of his photographic work.

Erwin Wurm is celebrated for a conceptual body of work incorporating sculpture, performance, video, drawing and photography in which he combines a sense of playfulness and a profound sense of the absurd. His work often questions our relationship to the body with irony and cynicism, frequently placing the viewer in a paradoxical relationship with objects. Although he is principally known as a sculptor, the medium of photography has always played a fundamental role in his work, both as a way of documenting and preserving ephemeral works and performances but also as a means in its own right.

Gathering together almost 200 prints produced since the 1980s and filling the museum’s two main floors, this extensive exhibition—the first to be seen in Paris in nearly twenty years—will present a number of prints, studies and original contact sheets from the artist’s personal archive, many of them never before seen by the public. Works on display will also include completely new works made by the artist expressly for the exhibition based on images from his personal archives. Together they reveal the essential role of the photographic medium in his work, delving into his process and exploring the way he conceives photography as a “sculptural” form of expression; he refers to these artworks as “photographic sculptures.”

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