In addition to material sculptures such as bloated cars and XXL gherkins, his work also includes videos, photos, drawings and books. This Saturday, the State Prize winner is celebrating his 70th birthday. The Albertina Modern is dedicating a retrospective to him from September 13th.
Erwin Wurm was born on July 27, 1954 in Bruck an der Mur. He studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg from 1977 to 1979 and at the University of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1979 to 1982. “I actually wanted to be a painter, but I didn’t pass the entrance exam and was put into the sculpture class,” Wurm said this year in an APA interview on the occasion of the publication of his first biography, written by Rainer Metzger. He created sculptures from boards, slats and sheet metal, which he painted in bright colors. In these early works he made ironic references to Futurism, thereby undermining art-historical certainties.
“At first I was infected by the quick success I achieved with the wood sculpture, which had a lot to do with the wild painting, the wild sculpture of the 80s. But then I quickly realized that this wasn’t really my future and I separated myself from it,” says Wurm. From 1990 onwards he presented his new way of working and “from then on there was a thread running through it. It’s always about the concept of the sculptural in relation to the social.”
International coup after veritable crisis
He made his first sculptures out of textiles, but also experimented with dust, until in 1997, after a veritable crisis – his father and mother died one after the other, his marriage to Dorothee Golz, from which his sons Laurin and Michael were born, broke up – he landed an international coup with the “One Minute Sculptures” captured in photographs and videos: By bringing people and everyday objects together in an unusual constellation, the artist deconstructed the processes of ritualized human activity in a way that shook up firmly established concepts and actions.
In 2006, a show comprising 400 works was shown at the mumok. The red “Fat convertible” Porsche, which represented Wurm’s method of making familiar objects overweight, was also on display. Another crowd-puller was an upside-down single-family house placed on the mumok roof. Since 2011, the man-sized cucumbers growing out of the asphalt – Wurm’s “Self-portrait as a pickled gherkin” – have been present in the Salzburg Festival District.
In 2011, Wurm wowed the audience at the Venice Biennale with his narrow house. He then showed what can be done with discarded furniture in an exhibition entitled “Schöner Wohnen” at the Vienna Museum of Applied Arts (MAK). In 2012, Wurm was responsible for a curved sailboat that was placed on the roof of the Vienna Hotel Daniel. In the same year, he presented new “anger sculptures” at the Gironcoli Museum in Eastern Styria and, as part of the “De Profundis” show, he painted over nude photos at the Albertina. Further exhibitions in Austria followed.
In 2020, a Lenten veil by Wurm was on display in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. In 2021, the elegant Via Veneto mile in Rome served as the backdrop for 14 installations by the Austrian art star. In 2022, Wurm showed a new group of works consisting of gleaming white sculptures up to four meters high in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana on St. Mark’s Square in Venice. For an art project in the same year, a huge bright red handbag with long legs adorned the center of Bonn.
Also criticizes the international art scene
As present as Wurm is in the international art scene, he does not hold back when criticizing it. He called the global art market a “hyena” in the 2012 TV documentary “The Artist Who Swallows the World,” which shows him as a self-critical artist who jets around the world and has no understanding of inefficiency in his everyday work. Wurm also used the awarding of the Grand State Prize on his 59th birthday to demonize the prevailing “fat-ass system.”
Despite his international success, Wurm has settled down in Austria and lives at Limberg Castle in Lower Austria. “I have a lot of friends here. The nature is beautiful. There is such a great history of architecture, etc. Of course there are a lot of idiots here, but there are idiots everywhere anyway.”
Whether he feels comfortable in the scene or not, Wurm is one of the most important artists of our time, is always at the top of the international art rankings (which he criticizes) and exhibits all over the world. In addition to the State Prize, the father of three, who is married to the artist Elise Mougin for the second time, received the Otto Mauer Prize in 1984, the City of Vienna Prize for Fine Arts in 1993, the City of Graz Art Prize in 2004 and the Grand Josef Krainer Prize in 2024.
