The works on view in Tomorrow: Yes, the majority of which are exhibited here for the first time, encompass materials from marble to bronze to aluminium and span some of Erwin Wurm’s most celebrated series. Brought together, they form a sculptural vocabulary for the abstract and the intangible, testifying to the Austrian artist’s radical disruption of the limitations of sculpture.
Watch a video of the artist discussing the exhibition
With its paradoxical and playful approaches to surface and material – solidity and fragility, volume and emptiness, history and ephemerality – Wurm’s work draws on the conventions and parameters of sculpture itself: what he calls ‘sculptural issues’. The exhibition unfolds around two monumental sculptural installations: a 6-metre-tall bent sailing boat, and a compressed schoolhouse.
Visitors are invited to step inside School (2024), which distorts the 19th-century silhouette of Wurm’s local village schoolhouse. In its narrow, low-ceilinged interior, the walls are plastered with vintage posters retracing some of the lessons once taught in French schools now considered outdated. The school’s cramped interior, complete with compacted chairs and a small blackboard, creates a sense of claustrophobia in the visitor who enters, mimicking the restrictiveness of teachings of the past, while encouraging us to reexamine the unquestioning beliefs we hold today.
Erwin Wurm
Star, 2025
Mixed media
600 × 630 × 95 cm (236.22 × 248.03 × 37.4 in)
Across the exhibition, the visitor encounters sculptures that, as Wurm put it, are ‘about human beings, but without human beings’. The Box People (2009–present) – cubic forms dressed in formal attire but lacking heads – interrogate the human condition and the role of the individual in the social, political and environmental conditions of the contemporary world.
The theme of clothing, which played an important role early in Wurm’s career, is once again at the heart of his recent work. In new works from his Substitutes series (2022–present), clothing appears in the form of unworn, empty shells – as if suddenly vacated by their wearers – from which sculptural forms are cast.
The One Minute Sculptures on view include elements such as a pile of two hats to be worn, a bottle of whisky to be drunk from a glass, and even Issey Miyake garments that visitors can put on to activate, following the One Minute Sculptures that featured on the runway in the presentation of Miyake’s Wurm-inspired Autumn/Winter 2025–26 collection at the Carrousel du Louvre, Paris in March 2025.
Coinciding with the 61st Venice Biennale
6 May—22 November 2026
Museo Fortuny, Venice
The Museo Fortuny will present an exhibition of works by Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, featuring both new sculptures shown for the first time and works retracing some of his most celebrated series. The exhibition unfolds across three floors of the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, which, for the first half of the 20th century, was the home and atelier of Spanish fashion designer Mariano Fortuny. The ground floor will be dedicated to a solo presentation of Wurm’s sculptures, while, on the first and second floors, his work will be brought into dialogue with Fortuny’s, the light-toned, ductile aspect of Wurm’s works conveying a sculptural plasticity as they emerge from the shadows of the museum’s rich collection. ‘I find that very exciting’, says Wurm, ‘placing contemporary sculpture in such a layered, historical environment’.
In the press
Wurm achieves a transformation in the opposite direction when objects or forms in his work assume distinctly human attributes. In his Stone Sculptures and Tall Bags, these anthropomorphised objects are perched on legs with characteristics or postures that evoke distinct personalities. He has also explored clothing as a sculptural theme – as a second skin, protective shell, outline, or the filling out of volume – in large-scale installations where architectural features are dressed in knitted pullovers. The artist views the bodily process of gaining or losing weight in sculptural terms as the addition or subtraction of material, and often creates illusions of growth or shrinkage, as in his Fat Cars or Narrow House. In recent ceramic works, Wurm has abstracted and isolated body parts such as ears, noses, hands or nipples to create surreal and suggestive forms.
Wurm lives and works in Vienna and Limberg, Austria. The artist has twice participated in the Venice Biennale: with his installation Narrow House at the Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti in 2011 and when he represented Austria in 2017. Recent solo museum exhibitions have been held at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2020); Musée Cantini, Marseille (2019); K11 MUSEA, Hong Kong (2019); Vancouver Art Gallery (2019); Albertina Museum, Vienna (2018); 21er Haus at the Belvedere, Vienna (2017); Leopold Museum, Vienna (2017); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo (2017); and Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2016).
