'Erwin Wurm’s School of Mistrust' Review of the artist's exhibition in Paris

By Jeremy Olds

In Erwin Wurm’s latest exhibition “Tomorrow: Yes,” the Austrian artist reexamines the toxic lessons embedded in his postwar education and considers why it’s important to question what we believe to be true.

At first, the sculptures of Austrian artist Erwin Wurm appear amusing. His latest show, Tomorrow: Yes, on now at Thaddaeus Ropac Pantin, includes a functioning, 6m-tall sailboat bent like a banana. A group of hefty black thought bubbles stand upright on skinny legs, like they walked off the page of a comic. An old police officer’s uniform stands to attention, though without a body, as if the person wearing it had been raptured. 

Yet beneath the irreverent veneer of these works lie interrogations of life’s absurdities that prove tragic, even nihilistic. A boat that aimlessly turns in circles critiques the purposelessness of luxury status symbols. Those bubbles allude to the philosophical mind-body dilemma, and whether our existence is defined by the physical or the mental. And the empty shell of a police uniform can be interpreted as the ghost of Wurm’s father, who worked as a detective and didn’t approve of his son’s artistic pursuits.

This tension between the innocuous and the troubling is impactfully incarnated in School (2024), which Wurm has restaged here for a French audience. School is a 1950s schoolhouse which has been shrunk, resulting in a condensed version of a functioning classroom. Stepping inside, viewers are forced to hunch beneath its low ceiling to observe the thin slivers of chairs and narrow square of a chalkboard. The walls are decorated with colorful, period-accurate posters which, on closer inspection, reflect the backwards ideologies of the time: a feverish romanticization of the French empire; racist depictions of the colonies; misogynistic depictions of women cleaning; portraits of important public features that feature just one woman, Marie Curie.

Gazing inside the small doorway, Wurm draws my attention to a seemingly innocent illustration of children playing doctor which is, in reality, an advertisement encouraging kids to drink Negrita rum. “I had these memories about school materials which were very odd and very strange,” he recalls. “When you look back, you realize, oh my God, what was happening there?”

Wurm, who is now 71, grew up in post-war Austria. “There were many Nazis, though it wasn’t so obvious,” he says. It was a rough environment: “We were body-shaming each other constantly. This was on a daily basis … We were beaten by the teachers with a stick. It was a rigid state and a rigid society.” School demonstrates how the stifling, state-sanctioned version of the truth we’re taught in our youth is subject to the norms of the time and, in retrospect, can become a sort of “poison,” to use Wurm’s word.

“It’s about knowledge and power. We are actually educated by two entities: parents and the state,” says Wurm. “That’s very interesting because that makes us think that maybe our knowledge from now, what is presented to us, might transform in 50 years into the opposite.” School, like much of Wurm’s work, provides a lesson in always being willing to interrogate that which we believe to be true.