Until April 2024, Yorkshire Sculpture Park is presenting Trap of the Truth – the first UK museum exhibition by Austrian artist Erwin Wurm – it features more than 100 works, including sculptures, paintings, photographs, videos and drawings created over 30 years of the artist’s career. Although easily classifiable as a retrospective, several works are being shown for the first time. Erwin Wurm is one of Austria’s most prominent artists. Over three decades he has challenged the rules of sculpture, the limitations of the human body and its relationship to the spaces it inhabits. His work disrupts perceptions of the familiar and sensible and in a process that abounds with humour and experimentation, he frequently reimagines commonplace objects by giving them human characteristics. Wurm ponders what sculpture is and what it can be – literally stretching its boundaries. He is both playful and political, using ludicrous scenarios to create work that addresses how sculpture can upend cultural beliefs. “At some point I came to realise that everything surrounding me can be material for an artistic work, absolutely everything. To begin with, because I had no money and worked relatively quickly, I used scraps of wood and cans. Then I used old clothing, which did not cost anything, before ultimately realising that I could actually use anything around me. That was the decisive step, as then anything was possible.” – Erwin Wurm Outdoors, 19 sculptures occupy YSP’s heritage landscape, Big Kastenmann (2012), which translates as ‘big box man,’ stands at five metres tall, with a large box for a torso wearing a formal pink and grey suit jacket. This was Wurm’s first large-scale public art project, displayed outside The Standard Hotel in New York City in 2012. Drawing on his nation’s historic and cultural identity, Wurm often interprets popular Austrian food items, the most iconic of which is the gherkin, with which he has a longstanding fascination. At YSP, it is presented with the four-metre-high bronze Der Gurk (2016), while three of Wurm’s Giants from the Abstract Sculptures series (2014-18), are anthropomorphised bronze sausages which reference the wiener hot dog, which takes its name from Austria’s capital, Vienna. Both foodstuffs lend themselves to being monumentalised as sculpture and propose contemporary readings of totems, idols, obelisks and other ancient sculptural forms. Wurm came to prominence in the 1990s with his One Minute Sculptures – an ongoing series of works where the artist gives written or drawn instructions for participants to pose with ordinary objects such as buckets, fruit or chairs for a limited time. He documents these fleeting interactions, where the viewer becomes the artwork, with photographs and video, a selection of which will be displayed alongside several of the objects. Extending the idea of viewer as artist, art object and participant, Ship of Fools(2017) is an adapted caravan with which visitors can interact by putting their heads, hands, bottoms, or feet through apertures, encouraging disruption and disorder in the normally hallowed museum setting. Completing the exhibition are six Flat Sculptures – oil on canvas works that the artist started painting 2020. Primarily working with sculpture, Wurm translates notions of form and volume to the brightly painted canvases, which have stretched and distorted letters spelling out their respective titles into almost unrecognisable shapes. “Erwin Wurm’s sculpture is a riot of expression and colour against the green Yorkshire landscape and in the galleries. His imaginative powers are limitless, and we hope that visitors will be inspired, energised, confounded, and amused by sculptures that portray familiar objects but in a way that is entirely unexpected. Couture handbags grow long legs and arms and have real attitude; a four-metre-high hot water bottle becomes a big, warm mother; a real truck bends and climbs a gallery wall; a gigantic gherkin stands proud. Wurm draws attention to the ways in which humans conform to society’s demands, to the psychological impact of contemporary culture, and to how we use history and tradition to scaffold our lives. The exhibition will provoke and captivate and it’s a great pleasure and privilege to stage Erwin Wurm’s first museum show in the UK.” – Clare Lilley, Director of Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Explore art, photography and design that inspires you. Discover new artists, Powered by Publications Social LegalWurm-derbar!
by Fabrizio Mifsud Soler.
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