Erwin Wurm - The Body As The House

The House

Pieces bring everyday elements into the realm of art, reconfiguring familiar objects such as houses, cars, clothes, and food into an unexpected, humorous context that simultaneously criticizes contemporary society.

- Erwin Wurm

These inanimate elements gain organic life - an obese house, a thin toilet, a sausage full of personality, and an overweight car.

Wurm seeks to push the definition of sculpture to the limit. He is primarily a sculptor who presents a narrative of the everyday transformed by the potencial of three-dimensionality.

The English Artist Antony Gormley once said that the true raw material of sculpture is energy, the heat needed to modify a material until it reaches the "condition of art".

One Minute Sculptures

In the late 1980s, he began the series One Minute Sculptures, which became emblematic, prefiguring the irreverent and self-referential behavior that the Internet would popularize.

As it should be in the ideal of art, where the work resides in observation, in Wurm the work resides at the meeting point between the artist's intention and the public's disposition.

There's no point in stealing a bronze sculpture because its value is not in its physical material, but in the emanation of the energy (measured in calories) of the furnace that sculpted it.
Metaphorically, we can assume that the same energy that results in a bronze or iron sculpture is the energy that sculpts our bodies.
The calorie that makes us gain or lose weight is the same force that wrestles with the forms of the sculpture.
You are the sculptor of your body and the calorie is the raw material of this sculpture.

Wurm is a fisherman of the eye, never losing sight of inoculating the mind with the virus of uncertainty, which makes us doubt what our eyes see.