The Body As The House

Erwin Wurm presents a series of works that discuss the human body, not only from the physical aspect, but also from its psychological and spiritual layers.

By Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2003) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

The House

His 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: The Body As The House (2003) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

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

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2017) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

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.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2017) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

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".

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2017) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2015) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

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.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2017) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2003) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Metaphorically, we can assume that the same energy that results in a bronze or iron sculpture is the energy that sculpts our bodies.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2003) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2012) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

The calorie that makes us gain or lose weight is the same force that wrestles with the forms of the sculpture.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2016) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2015) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2012) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2014) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

You are the sculptor of your body and the calorie is the raw material of this sculpture.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2014) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2016) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2015) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

"The body as the work, the work as body", as the Portuguese sculptor Antonio Manuel would say.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2006) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

The Artist Who Swallowed the World

Consumption - from what we eat to what we long to possess - is a recurring topic in the works of the Austrian artist.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2017) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Wurm makes the word "diet" take on the dimension of an exercise in contemporary faith.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2010) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (1936/2006) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

"The diet" he says, "is like a philosophy that is part of our daily life: on the one hand, it has a physical aspect, and on the other, a spiritual dimension."

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2010) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2005) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

This ambiguity makes it possible to refer both to the diet of consumerism and to the diet of foods: both reveal an existence within the dimension of excess.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2010) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2008) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

And, as William Blake would say, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793).

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2005) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2015) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Food

Erwin Wurm gives new meaning to the role of the body in art, giving materiality to things that did not have it.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2016) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2005/2006) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

He transforms the car, the sausage, the cucumber and the house into sculptural material, and inscribes them with a symbolic dimension, of our time, in which the banal is object of constant appreciation and boredom can be enshrined.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2011) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2017) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm's great trump is to exist within a territory, often cynical, of contemporary art with a work that manages to be critical, while remaining accessible.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2017) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2014) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

His art pieces can subvert and at the same time draw the audience to a reflective dimension that is, simutaneously, fun and inclusive.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2014) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2017) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

One Minute Sculptures

Long before the idea of interactivity, social networks and the epidemic of selfies, Wurm created something that would be a simulation of a behavior not yet foreshadowed.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2017) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

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.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2017) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

The work never exists until it meets its public: it happens in the presence of its context.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2017) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

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.

Erwin Wurm: The Body As The House (2017) by Erwin WurmCentro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasília

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.

Credits: Story

Erwin Wurm - The Body is The House
Curator: Marcello Dantas
Text: Marcello Dantas
April/June 2017 - Brasília
Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil

Credits: All media

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