Erwin Wurm: A 70th-Birthday Retrospective Museum Exhibitions to See This Fall

“Erwin Wurm: A 70th-Birthday Retrospective” at Albertina, Vienna

With Erwin Wurm now moving into his seventh decade, the Albertina is giving him a full-dress retrospective. There will, of course, be the works for which this giant of the Austrian scene is best known, his “One Minute Sculptures,” which call on laypeople to enact brief performances with quotidian objects. These works, like many others by Wurm, question whether art can serve any purpose within the world—and, if the answer is no, whether that matters much at all. Consider that a winking critique of modernism’s obsession with functionalism, or think of it as joke on the pieces’ participants, who often must go through some physical labor to perform nonsense gestures.

September 13, 2024–March 9, 2025