Erwin Wurm is Austria’s most successful living artist. His “One Minute Sculptures”, in which the Styrian artist transforms people into grotesque contortions by using everyday objects in sculptures, made him famous in the 1990s. In addition to material sculptures such as blown-up cars and XXL cucumbers, his work also includes videos, photographs, drawings and books.
The winner of the state prize will be 70 years old on July 27. Despite his international success, he has remained based in Austria and lives in Wurm Limberg Castle in Lower Austria. “I have many friends here. The nature is beautiful. There is such a great history of architecture, etc. Of course, there are many idiots here, but they are everywhere.”
“Hyenas” and “fat ass system”
As present as Wurm is on the international art scene, he doesn’t hesitate to criticize it. He described the global art market as a “hyena” in the 2012 TV documentary “The Artist Who Swallows the World,” which shows him as a self-critical artist who flies around the world and has no understanding of the inefficiencies in his daily work. Wurm also used the presentation of the Grand State Prize on his 59th birthday to demonize the prevailing “fat ass system.”
Whether he feels comfortable in the scene or not: Wurm is one of the most important artists of the moment, 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 for the second time to the artist Elise Mougin, has received, among others, the Otto Mauer Prize in 1984, the City of Vienna Prize for Fine Arts in 1993, the Art Prize of the City of Graz in 2004 and the Grand Josef Prize in 2024. Krainer Prize.
“In the beginning I was infected by the rapid success I had with wood sculptures, which had a lot to do with wild painting. “But I quickly realized that this was not really my future and I walked away from it,” says Wurm. From 1990 he introduced his new way of working and “there was a common thread running through it from then on. It is always about the concept of the sculptural in relation to the social.”
Experiments with textiles and fabrics
He made his first sculptures from textiles, but also experimented with fabric, until in 1997, after a real crisis, when his father and mother died shortly after each other, and his marriage to Dorothee Golz, from which his sons Laurin and Michael emerged, ended in disaster. – with “One Minute Sculptures” an international coup d’état was carried out.
Lenten clothing and installations in Rome
In 2020, a Lenten cloth by Wurm was on display in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. The elegant Via Veneto mile in Rome served as the backdrop for 14 installations by the Austrian art star in 2021. In 2022, Wurm showed a new group of works consisting of bright white sculptures up to four meters high in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana on St. Mark’s Square in Venice. In the same year, a huge bright red handbag with long legs adorned the center of Bonn for an art project.
Source: Krone
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