Erwin Wurm

Erwin Wurm (b. 1954, Bruck an der Mur, Austria) is an Austrian artist who lives and works between Vienna and New York. He studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Graz and the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna. His practice, developed from the mid-1980s, uses humor, instruction, and everyday objects to interrogate the conventions of sculpture and the relationship between the body, objects, and social norms.

He is best known for the One Minute Sculptures — a series begun in the 1990s in which the artist or viewer is invited to follow written instructions (hold a cucumber to your forehead; balance a bucket on your head with one finger) and maintain the pose for one minute, the resulting configuration documented photographically. This process questions what constitutes a sculpture, who is the author, and where the work exists — in the body, in the documentation, or in the instruction itself. His Fat Car (2001) — a Porsche with bulging, flesh-like body panels suggesting obesity — and Fat House (2003) extended this logic into architecture and design, inflating familiar forms into absurdist objects of excess. House Attack (2006), in which a house appeared to crash headfirst into the facade of the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna (Mumok), became one of his most widely identified works. He has had retrospectives at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, MEP, and the Mumok, and his work is held by MoMA, Tate, and major collections internationally.