Erwin Wurm – Am I Still A House?

Erwin Wurm Fat House Jesse Willems

11th April until 12th July 2015 

Erwin Wurm is currently one of Austria’s most successful artists. His creative approach is complex and the forms of expression in his work are correspondingly versatile. Apart from sculptures, his oeuvre includes film, photography, drawings and performances, and as he himself summarizes, he is concerned with “showing everyday life from a different perspective”. The motifs of his art are generally everyday objects. However, in the course of the artistic process, houses, cars, garments among other things, are formally alienated or utilized in unusual ways.  A well-known example of this method, are his improvised ‘One Minute Sculptures’, in which the artist gives instructions for interaction with everyday objects. The person carrying out these instructions becomes himself the sculpture for a brief moment of time. 

The exhibition ‘Am I Still A House?’ presents Erwin Wurm’s sculptures in the context of the house. Among the exhibits is the walk-in sculpture ‘Fat House’ from 2004, a full-size country house imbued with a humanlike adiposity. A video within the sculpture shows a computer animation of a soliloquy by the talking house about existential issues. As in the case of ‘Fat House’ the other exhibits also bafflingly deformed. They are fat and obese, fissured, they melt away or display traces of violent treatment. This alienation is what lends the works their sculptural quality and one’s perception is directed into a nether region where the spontaneous identification with such a banal concept as ‘the house’ comes totally unstuck. Instead, the abstract, formal quality of the object becomes the focal point.     

Erwin Wurm, born in 1954 in Bruck, Austria, firstly studied at the University Mozarteum Salzburg and then attended the University of Applied Arts Vienna. From 2002 to 2010 he lectured as a professor for sculpture and multimedia at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 2013 he was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize.

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