Erwin Wurm is an Austrian artist born in 1954. Throughout his career, Wurm has sought to deconstruct sculpture, expanding its spatial and temporal dimensions as well as exploring questions of weight and volume. Wurm’s work involves taking something mundane and enlarging, curving, or otherwise distorting it. His goal is to cause the viewer to look closer at the sculpture and find its true meaning.
Although Wurm is known today as a pioneering sculptor, as a student he had been more interested in painting. It wasn’t until the summer of 2021, during a stay in Greece, that he started painting again. ‘At first I thought it would just be a pastime for a few weeks,’ Wurm stated in an interview with journalist Larissa Kikol. ‘Then it intensified and now I paint all the time. It’s like therapy. Unbelievable.’
Wurm’s work is in numerous international public and private collections, including the Albertina, Vienna; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthaus, Zürich; Museum of Modern Art, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London and Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice among others.