ART CITIES:Paris-Erwin Wurm
Over the course of his career, Erwin Wurm has radically expanded conceptions of sculpture, space and the human form. His sculptures straddle abstraction and representation, presenting familiar objects in a surprising and inventive way that prompts viewers to consider them in a new light. He often explores mundane, everyday decisions as well as existential questions in his works, focusing on the objects that help us cope with daily life and through which we ultimately define ourselves.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Archive
Erwin Wurm in his solo exhibition “Skins” presents his most recent series of sculptures titled “Skin” and an exclusive look at the “Flat Sculptures”, the artist’s first foray into painting. These works constitute the artist’s most pointed exploration of the subject to date. As the economy of means of the sculptures on show contrasts with the visual saturation of the candy-colored paintings, together the two series foreground the artist’s dialectic approach to thinking sculpturally in two dimensions. Although Wurm is known today as a pioneering sculptor, as a student he had been more interested in painting. Admitted into the sculpture programme of Salzburg’s Mozarteum University, rather than the painting course he had initially applied for, he began by asking himself the fundamental question of what makes a sculpture. This radical approach has defined the artist’s practice for the past five decades, and it wasn’t until the summer of 2021, during a stay in Greece with his friend, the Austrian painter and engraver Hans Weigand, that he started painting again. More abstract in appearance than his iconic sculptures of cars, houses and gherkins, the “Flat Sculptures”, as Wurm has named his paintings, are made up of words like ‘stone’, ‘wurst’, ‘melt’ or ‘clay’, which reference past series of works including the “Stone Sculptures”, “Fat Cars” and “Abstract Sculptures”. Painted in various shades of yellow, pink and blue, together the works form a palette reminiscent of pale skin, forming a kind of membrane as the artist extends the planes of color to cover the sides of the canvas. Wurm likens the process behind his “Flat Sculptures” to his early experiments with volume, in which he explored the consequences of making two-dimensional objects three-dimensional. His 1991 video “13 Pullover”, for example, featured his friend, Austrian artist Fabio Zolly, layering on thirteen jumpers, thereby altering his shape and rendering the flat garments three-dimensional, while at the same time causing them to lose their functionality. Similarly, the letters in his “Flat Sculptures” are stretched and squeezed to occupy the entire surface of the canvas. This makes them almost illegible save for the small portions of contrasting ground that appear between them, but allows them to acquire body and becoming almost tangible in the process. In the “Skin” sculptures, Wurm turns the liminal surface that separates the volume of the body from that of the surrounding space into the subject of his work. Twisting around an invisible form, the sinewy slices of an absent, fully clothed body appear at once poetic, unnerving and absurd. Also known as ‘thin sculptures’, the works are made from partial casts of live models, who are posed in the middle of mundane actions such as bending, lifting or holding things. After two years of unprecedented isolation, many studies have highlighted the importance of touch in allowing us to make sense of the world around us. In “Skins” Wurm highlights the function of surface as the connector between internal experience and external reality. At the same time, the artist credits both series of works with giving him a renewed sense of freedom and creativity in his own practice.
Photo: Erwin Wurm, Lars Lying (Skin), 2020, © Studio Erwin Wurm, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 7 Rue Debelleyme, Paris, France, Duration: 2/3-23/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, https://ropac.net/
