Since the 1980s, Austrian artist Erwin Wurm has worked to expand traditional notions of sculpture. Through his “one-minute sculptures,” which document conceptual performances in films and photographs, he invites viewers to realize that actions are more important than objects. Inspired by popular culture and an idiosyncratic exploration of space, form, and volume, Wurm employs furniture, houses, cars, buckets, and other quotidian objects of modern culture. Demonstrating a signature tongue-in-cheek humor, he mixes melancholy, irony, absurdity, and ephemerality. As Wurm himself points out, his work revolves around the question, “Is this an action or is this a sculpture—and when does one turn into the other?”…see the entire article in the print version of May’s Sculpture magazine.
