Erwin Wurm Has the art world bottled it?

By Chris Harvey

Erwin Wurm is fascinated by cars. The Austrian artist, whose playful take on sculpture has made him a global draw, is struck by the ­way they visually represent us: how we “define” ourselves by the cars we drive. He loves, too, the way that comic-book artists take images of cars and bend and stretch them to create an idea of speed. In 2008, he did just this to an actual Renault 25. “Oh my God, I think it was the most difficult project I ever did,” he recalls over a video call from ­Vienna. “We had to demount the entire car and make some of the parts totally new, like the windows and the mirrors. It was unbelievable, crazy amount of work.”