Erwin Wurm
Wurm’s relationship to sculpture was, by his own account, not entirely a matter of choice. Enrolling in art school in Vienna, he had hoped to become a painter but was instead placed in the sculpture course, and responded by testing the medium’s boundaries until it felt his own. Yet Wurm has since expanded into painting as well; works he characteristically refers to as Flat Sculptures.
Thus trained as a sculptor, Wurm began his career producing sheet-metal works before moving toward abstract forms during the 1980s. Toward the end of that decade, he started incorporating clothing into his practice. Trousers and sweaters, folded and hung in particular configurations, became soft, pliable sculptures in their own right. By 1989–90 he was working with a wider range of materials still, and video entered his practice alongside three-
dimensional objects, further expanding what sculpture could be. In the 1992 video 59 Stellungen (59 Positions), a man and his sweater cycle through 59 different poses, an early demonstration of Wurm’s conviction that sculpture need not be a fixed, permanent object. This idea would be further elaborated in Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures, which he developed in the late 1990s. In these works, viewers are invited to assume absurd poses using everyday objects: balancing on chairs, placing flowers in their pants, or holding their
breath while thinking of Spinoza. These brief, performative actions transform the body into sculpture, replacing the traditional static object with a temporal, interactive experience; sculpture fixed in neither time nor space. The One Minute Sculptures remain central to Wur’s practice and have been featured at major venues including the Venice Biennale in 2017.
Humour has long been one of the defining characteristics of Wurm’s work. Oversized pickles, dancing sausages, distorted cars, and improbably balanced everyday objects are among the recurring protagonists of his sculptural world. Yet the comic dimension of these works is rarely an end in itself. Rather, it emerges from a persistent displacement of ordinary perception, where subtle shifts in scale, function, or context expose the instability of what otherwise appears self-evident. This restless relationship to sculpture runs alongside a broader formative influence: Wurm’s childhood in post-war Austria, shaped by a Nazi past that remained largely unspoken and by the culture of conformity that this silence produced. His works may thus be read, not as a commentary on Austria alone, but on broader mechanisms of social consensus. Humour, in this light, is less a message than a mode of perception: a consequence of approaching the world through an absurd, often paradoxical logic that allows the familiar to appear strange once again.
By manipulating scale, volume, and proportion, Wurm transforms everyday objects into uncanny sculptural forms that expose the social and psychological structures embedded within them. Clothing, furniture, houses, and cars become instruments for examining how identity, possession, and social relations are shaped through our encounters with things. In the Fat Car series (2001–2005), Wurm transforms luxury vehicles into inflated, bubbly
sculptures, while the related Fat House (2003), a bloated version of an ordinary house so swollen it presses into the ceiling of the museum housing it, invites visitors inside. In Narrow House (2010), by contrast, he shrinks his childhood home, a typical house in a postwar Austrian suburb, into a bizarre, elongated form.
It is undoubtedly possible to explore Wurm’s work through a more theoretical lens. His Fat Car series, for instance, echoes Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on social distinction, suggesting that the inflated luxury vehicles expose how consumer goods function as markers of status and class; objects through which we perform identity as much as we possess it. Similarly, the One Minute Sculptures may be interpreted as small experiments in social conditioning. By asking participants to adopt absurd poses on command, Wurm exposes our quiet, almost involuntary readiness to comply with arbitrary instructions. Read this way, Wurm’s humor is not merely playful but rather a means of gently loosening the viewer’s guard and allowing something more critical to slip through.
Wurm has long engaged with philosophy and questions of subjectivity, exploring how identity and perception are constructed rather than given. In the series Désespéré/Desperate (2008), he creates sculptural portraits of Wittgenstein, Adorno, and Deleuze that examine the images and projections through which philosophers come to be imagined and remembered. In Disziplin der Subjektivität (2006), a car is improbably balanced against a wall on nothing more than a marker pen. The work suspends the object between equilibrium
and collapse, lending it an almost ontological uncertainty, as though its material existence rested on contingency rather than physical certainty. This destabilisation of the everyday recurs throughout Wurm’s practice, where familiar objects are stripped of their apparent self-evidence and made to oscillate between the absurd and the profound. The ongoing Mind Bubbles series, inspired by the visual language of comic books, extends these concerns into the realm of thought. Here, the thought bubble becomes a sculptural vehicle for ideas and words that enter the viewer’s mind without ever revealing their content. Like the One Minute Sculptures, the works rely on the viewer to be fully realised. But where the earlier series turns participation into a physical act, momentarily transforming the participant into a sculpture, the Mind Bubbles relocate that participation to the realm of imagination, inviting viewers to complete the work through acts of mental projection.
Across sculpture, photography, drawing, video, and text, Wurm’s practice is united by a sustained interest in the unstable relationship between body, object, and subjectivity. His works repeatedly challenge what appears fixed or self-evident, inviting viewers to reconsider both the material world and their own role in perceiving it.
Wurm’s work is held in major public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Centre Pompidou, Walker Art Center, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. He has received Austria's Grand State Prize for Fine Arts (2013), the GNMH Award (2021), and an honorary doctorate from the University of Belgrade (2022). He is represented by Thaddaeus Ropac, Lehmann Maupin, and König Galerie. The exhibition at Carling Dalenson Gallery, Mind Bubbles & More features a number of recent paintings, Flat Sculptures, as well as four larger, three-dimensional sculptures. The Stockholm show follows solo exhibitions at institutions such as Museo Fortuny, Venice, and Flatz Museum – Zentrum für Photographie, Dornbirn, Austria, earlier in 2026.