ERWIN WURM
ONE MINUTE SCULPTURES
MAK Center for Art and Architecture
at the Schindler House
835 North Kings Road - West Hollywood
28/1/2016 - 27/3/2016
Austrian artist Erwin Wurm’s One
Minute Sculptures have influenced a generation of sculptors, though this body of
work has never been shown at a major institution in Los Angeles. These inclusive
and interactive works act simultaneously as off-the-cuff quips and radical
reconsiderations of the major questions key to both sculpture and art viewing:
how figures relate to their ground, how one inhabits space, and how simple acts
of re-framing can alter perceptions.
For his exhibition at the Schindler
House, Wurm will source props ranging from banal to blatantly comedic, and then
produce a set of instructions for visitors to perform the various sculptures for
sixty seconds at a time, consisting of balancing acts, mild contortions, and
altered uses of everyday physical objects.
By soliciting visitors to
complete the artworks themselves, Wurm invites them to ask questions about the
differences between artwork and art work, the activity of art alongside the
display object. Generally first encountered as a written description of a
suggestive drawing, the sculpture instructions at the Schindler House will leave
the completion of the idea up to the willingness of visitors. The transitory and
ephemeral nature of the project cannot be overstated—at core the works are an
exercise in the effects of context and perception—and visitors are activated as
artists themselves to point out how those exercises resonate within the
Schindler House.
Erwin Wurm’s practice has been celebrated and exhibited
internationally. His work has most recently been shown in solo shows at the
Indianapolis Museum of Art; Städel Museum, Frankfurt/Main; Stiftung Wilhelm
Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany; Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York; Anna
Schwartz Gallery, Sydney; Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen; Dom Umenia /
Kunsthalle Bratislava, Bratislava, Slovakia; Halle Verrière, Meisenthal,
Lorraine, France; Büro Weltausstellung, Vienna; and Greith-Haus, St. Ulrich im
Greith, Austria. He has work in permanent collections around the world,
including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New
York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon; Städel Museum,
Frankfurt/Main; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; mumok–museum moderner kunst stiftung
Ludwig wein; MAK–Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, Vienna; and
Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga, Spain.
Image: Erwin Wurm, One
Minute Sculpture, 1997. C-print, 45 x 30 cm. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann
Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. © Erwin Wurm
