ERWIN WURM
HOT

SCAD MUSEUM OF ART, SAVANNAH, US
16 AUGUST – 15 JANUARY 2024

Erwin Wurm rethinks the basic tenets of sculpture, focusing on the relationship between the human body and everyday objects. His work critiques contemporary culture through an absurdist sensibility that scrutinizes concepts of weight, volume, balance, texture, proportion, and time. In this two-part exhibition, Wurm presents an overview of his practice and an in-depth look at his ongoing relationship to fashion.

Erwin Wurm, "Moncler," 2021, archival pigment print, 78 3/4 x 52 1/2 in. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London.

The first section of the exhibition includes works in a variety of media that test assumed parameters of authorship, participation, materiality, legibility, and permanence. This experimental thinking is most clearly exemplified in the artist’s famed One Minute Sculptures, which invite audiences to briefly pose with specific objects, and in doing so, complete the artwork. The second section of the exhibition in the museum’s André Leon Talley Gallery focuses on Wurm’s collaborations with fashion brands and magazines. In cheeky reimaginings of the uses of high fashion, the artist creates photographs and sculptures that transform elegant garments by Hermès and other illustrious brands into strange distortions of the human form. With these radical works, Wurm unveils the ways that fashion shapes – and is shaped by – our bodies and culture.

HOT is co-organized by SCAD Museum of Art chief curator Daniel S. Palmer and curator Ben Tollefson.

FEATURED ARTIST

ERWIN WURM
Erwin Wurm (b. 1954 in Bruck an der Mur, Austria) lives and works in Vienna. His oeuvre comprises sculptures, photography, video, performance, and painting. His works often involve everyday objects such as cars, houses, clothing, luxury bags, and food products, with which he ironically comments on consumerism and capitalist mass production. Wurm gained widespread popularity in the 1990s with his “One Minute Sculptures”. Museum pedestals are displayed and left devoid of any work, so that the audience can take the place of the sculpture for one minute, according to the artist’s whimsical instructions. With this ironic yet radical gesture, Wu...
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