Spend anytime in the Austrian art world and the name Erwin Wurm pops up regularly. Although known best for his sculptures, the Albertina Modern’s retrospective covers the entirety of his innovative oeuvre.
- Honours his 70th birthday
- Sculptures, drawings, paintings & more
- Covers important works, periods and series
- Book Albertina Modern tickets* online
- Runs Sept 13, 2024 – Mar 9, 2025
- See also:
A retrospective
(Erwin Wurm, Mind Bubble Walking Pink, 2024, 230 × 165 × 125 cm, aluminium; press photo © Erwin Wurm / Bildrecht, Wien 2024; photo by Markus Gradwohl)
You have to sit up when someone’s works find their way into the Tate, the Centre Pompidou or New York’s MoMA and Solomon R. Guggenheim museums.
Such is the case with Erwin Wurm, whose creative output appears all over the world in exhibitions and collections, firmly establishing the Austrian as one of the most successful artists of our day.
Wurm is best known for his diverse sculptures. Indeed he has often pushed the envelope on the exact nature of that medium.
The artist’s famous One Minute Sculptures, for example, see sculpture meet performance art as he invites bystanders to form their own temporary installation according to his instructions. The outcome survives only if captured, for example, in a photograph (some of which appear in the exhibition).
When the Red Hot Chili Peppers shot their video for the 2003 single release Can’t Stop, the poses taken drew their inspiration from Wurm’s immersive format, as acknowledged at the end of the video.
The 2024 retrospective at the Albertina Modern honours the artist’s 70th birthday. It pays tribute to Wurm’s diverse output by covering various media along with his more recognised and important works and series.
(Erwin Wurm, Fat Convertible, 2005. 130 × 480 × 237 cm, mixed media © Erwin Wurm / Bildrecht, Vienna 2024; press photo: Vincent Everarts)
As such, we see everything from early wood and dust sculptures of the 80s through to Wurm’s latest works.
Wandering through the galleries, you might raise a smile or two. But any humour is incidental to Wurm’s broad invitation to reassess the way we look at the everyday and the objects around us…highlighting the absurdity and paradoxes of life.
The comic-style and large-scale performative sculptures in the exhibition perhaps leave the greatest impression on the casual observer.
Works like 2005’s Guggenheim Melting, which portrays the building doing just that. Or Fat Convertible from the same year, which also begs the questions of how they got the car into the building.
Like Fat Convertible, many sculptures trigger recognition but altered in ways subtle or significant. As such, they tug at your perception.
Wurm’s work, though, also covers photographs, paintings, videos, and more. His drawings featured, for example, at Vienna’s Albertina museum in 2019 in the solo Peace & Plenty exhibition.
I particularly enjoyed, for example, the watercolour portraits from the 1990s(?), which reveal a wry observational style close to my heart.
Dates, tickets & tips
Enjoy the full gamut of Erwin Wurm’s creativity from September 13th, 2024 to March 9th, 2025. An entrance ticket for or from the Albertina Modern includes the exhibition within.
(Booking service provided by Tiqets.com*, who I am an affiliate of)
For much of that period, the museum also has an exhibition of drawings by Alfred Kubin. I’d suggest seeing that before Wurm’s works, since the latter’s use of colour and his less-despairing outlook should restore your demeanour after exposure to Kubin’s dark (in many senses of the word) images.
How to get to the works
Just follow the travel tips on the main Albertina Modern page. The museum is easily reached by foot from the centre or through tram and subway lines to Karlsplatz.
Address: Karlsplatz 5, 1010 Vienna