ArtForum, Oct, 1996

Erwin Wurm: Galerie Wilma Lock - sculptural exhibit
ArtForum, Oct, 1996 by Peter Nesweda

During the mid '80s Erwin Wurm gained a reputation for his life-size figurative sculptures in painted sheet metal, but he soon abandoned these works for subtler concepts. Wurm's recent work can essentially be divided into three groups: his clothing pieces, his "dust pieces," and his video works. The first group involves transforming articles of clothing - such as sweaters, coats, or pants - into sculptures, by merely folding them. He is uninterested in investing found objects with "aura," but instead he focuses on his work's reproducibility. In this show he wrote step-by-step instructions for folding a coat directly onto the gallery wall, allowing the viewer to become involved in the creation of his sculptures.

To create his "Staubarbeiten" (Dust works, 1990-) Wurm arranged house dust in a black vitrine - giving the impression that an object had been recently removed from it. From the "impression" left by the dust, one instinctively attempts to reconstruct the original form of the object, which has "etched" itself into the space.
In the video entitled Shopping, 1995, in which two people enter a store and put on all the clothes they can seemingly get their hands on, 54 items each, layer upon layer, Wurm evokes the sculptural process through the accumulation of the clothes that enlarges each of the figures. The participants stuff the remaining items of clothing into plastic bags and leave the store, inevitably evoking the homeless. In the video Anschatzen der Holzmasse (Gauging the wood mass, 1995), a man tries to lie down on a narrow wooden rail, but he keeps falling off. Viewing this work, one sensed the energy that had to be expended in the attempt, just as in any sculptural process.

The work entitled ILK, 1996, consisted of two cardboard boxes, with their opened sides placed at a diagonal to one another. Inside the smaller of the two cases Wurm placed a projector, which beamed a video image of both boxes seen from the outside onto the back wall of the larger case. Peering into the case from the outside, one saw a moving image of both cases from the point of view of a spectator walking around them - a play between the represented and the real. In this work, as in others, Wurm's attempts to grapple with three-dimensionality, though theoretical in nature, always resonate with humor.
- Peter Nesweda
Translated from the German by David Jacobson.