Erwin Wurm: Good Boy

Erwin Wurm: Good Boy
MOCAK, 4 Lipowa St, 30-702 Kraków, Poland
18 October 2013 - 26 January 2014
From the Press Release

MOCAK is exhibiting the first comprehensive Polish exhibition of the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm (b. 1954), which will include his most-acclaimed works such as One Minute Sculptures, as well as sculptures, photographs, objects and video. The Artist Who Swallowed The World is being shown side by side with large-scale works, such as the life-sized Truck, or cucumbers cast in bronze. Also showing is a selection of works from the series Instructions How to Be Politically Incorrect.

What interests the artist is the mundane, which he approaches in a contrary manner. Wurm’s trademark is the absurd, the surprising and the ephemeral. Using humour he attempts to divert the viewer’s thought processes off the beaten track.

Wurm describes all his works as sculpture, regardless of whether they are photographs, objects, drawings or videos. His works are often produced as variants achieved by altering the mass and volume. Some of his best-known works include One Minute Sculptures, Fat House and Fat Car. For the One Minute Sculptures, which the artist has been creating since the 1990s, viewers, the artist provides verbal and drawn instructions, so that, employing everyday objects provided by the artist viewers adopt unusual, absurd and amusing poses, thus making their own bodies into sculptures. Momentarily visitors become a work of art in the exhibition.

A characteristic of Wurm’s art is the ironic humour that the artist himself refers to as critical cynicism and relies on observing individuals in their multidimensional corporeity. Wurm’s works are frequently anthropomorphic; they are distorted, often overblown images taken from everyday life. Using simple devices, Wurm comments directly on our reality in images whose bluntness is related to the aesthetic of a comic strip.