Erwin Wurm: A 70th-Birthday Retrospective
Albertina Modern, Vienna
September 13, 2024 – March 09, 2025

Today, Erwin Wurm numbers among the world’s most successful and well-known contemporary artists. On the occasion of Wurm’s 70th birthday, ALBERTINA MODERN is presenting a first-ever sweeping retrospective featuring his diverse oeuvre in all artistic media.

Alongside the main thread that runs throughout his intense and innovative creative career, namely that of his distinctive sculptures, this presentation also aims to introduce the public to less well-known but equally significant works and work groups. The resulting selection will form a dense network of artistic statements comprising sculptures, drawings, working instructions and documentation, videos, objects, photographs, and paintings that invite us to shine a light on what Wurm himself points to as being “the paradox and absurd” in our world, our lives, our everyday existence.

In light of the novel sort of hierarchical proportion thus suggested, aspects such as shifted and quirky situations and physical proportions, viewing angles, and an unconventional approach to artworks and actions taken therewith can likewise evoke new realizations.

Erwin Wurm first achieved international renown with his One Minute Sculptures in which the viewers, by carrying out his sketched and/or written work assignments, themselves become part of the artwork. The instant this occurs, the notion of sculpture undergoes a performative expansion that occasionally defies ephemerality thanks to its conservation in photographic form.

With his Fat Cars and Tiny Houses as well as with his marble sculptures of cucumbers, bread rolls, and sausages or even coveted luxury items such as ladies’ handbags atop longer-than-life human legs, though they all may be outwardly evocative of smiles, Erwin Wurm shines a critical spotlight on consumer society’s manipulative mechanisms and their effects.

This exhibition brings together principal works from all stations of Wurm’s artistic career, drawing an arc from the early wooden and dust sculptures of the 1980s to his latest creations. Accompanying it will be an extensive catalog that documents all of the important stations of Erwin Wurm’s artistic career to date in the spirit of this celebratory occasion.

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