RIGA.- From June 13 until September 14 Zuzeum Art Centre presents Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm’s first solo show in Latvia. Erwin Wurm (b. 1954) is considered one of the most influential European sculptors of the last few decades. How It Is collects his works from different periods, presenting a unique perspective on the artist’s singular mix of figuration, philosophy, and the absurd. Armed with a motto of “everything is connected to everything else”, Erwin Wurm thinks of the human body as a malleable, open-ended connector between the organic and the human-made, the perks of consumer culture, and the stalemates of conspicuous consumption.
The show's title is taken from Irish playwright and Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett’s 1962 novel of the same name. The eponymous sculpture (2024), one of Wurm's more complex works, belongs to the series of One Minute Sculptures that the artist began in late 1990s. This series offers the audience the possibility to transform themselves into a living sculpture by following the artist’s specific instructions and performing simple exercises with everyday objects. A selection of One Minute Sculptures is complemented by several photographs titled One Minute Photographs, showing the sculptures in the state of activation.
Several iconic images take centre stage in the exhibition. Fat Convertible (2005) is Wurm’s famous comment on car culture, where the artist draws the notion of a vehicle as a continuation of the body to its illogical conclusion. The mirrored surface of the sculpture adds an interactive dimension to the work, transforming it into a funhouse. The show also includes Flat Sculptures, paintings in which words or letters are used like sculptural objects within the pictorial space. Wurm is less interested in the words’ readability, but rather in their form, materiality, and visual presence within the image. The series Attacks (2021–22) can be seen as a performative act, in which the homes of key German philosophers (Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx) are deformed using everyday food products.
The most recent body of work in the show, Substitutes (2024), is a continuation of Wurm’s long-standing interest in clothing as a volume that both holds the body and creates a set of meanings for its owner. The monumental scale of Substitutes, made from thin sheets of painted aluminium, presents the garments as characters in themselves, divorced from the wearer’s personality.
Erwin Wurm lives and works in Vienna and Limberg, Austria. He has twice participated in the Venice Biennale, representing Austria in 2017. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions around the world, including Vancouver Art Gallery (2019), Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2020), Suwon Museum of Art (2022), Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2023), SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2023–24), Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2023–24), Albertina Modern (2024–2025), and Towada Art Center, Japan (2025), as well as Marmorschlössl, Bad Ischl (2025), among many others.
