Erwin Wurm: Hot Solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art

Erwin Wurm rethinks the basic tenets of sculpture, focusing on the relationship between the human body and everyday objects. His work critiques contemporary culture through an absurdist sensibility that scrutinizes concepts of weight, volume, balance, texture, proportion, and time. In this two-part exhibition, Wurm presents an overview of his practice and an in-depth look at his ongoing relationship to fashion.

The first section of the exhibition includes works in a variety of media that test assumed parameters of authorship, participation, materiality, legibility, and permanence. This experimental thinking is most clearly exemplified in the artist’s famed One Minute Sculptures, which invite audiences to briefly pose with specific objects, and in doing so, complete the artwork. The second section of the exhibition in the museum’s André Leon Talley Gallery focuses on Wurm’s collaborations with fashion brands and magazines. In cheeky reimaginings of the uses of high fashion, the artist creates photographs and sculptures that transform elegant garments by Hermès and other illustrious brands into strange distortions of the human form. With these radical works, Wurm unveils the ways that fashion shapes — and is shaped by — our bodies and culture.

Erwin Wurm lives and works in Vienna and Limberg, Austria. Over the course of his career, he has radically expanded conceptions of sculpture, space and the human form. His sculptures straddle abstraction and representation, presenting familiar objects in a surprising and inventive way that prompts viewers to consider them in a new light.