How It Is
Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm’s first solo show in Latvia will take place at the Zuzeum Art Centre from June 13 until September 14
Erwin Wurm (b. 1954) is considered one of the most influential European sculptors of the last few decades. How It Is collects his works from different periods, presenting a unique perspective on the artist’s singular mix of figuration, philosophy, and the absurd. Armed with a motto of “everything is connected to everything else”, Erwin Wurm thinks of the human body as a malleable, open-ended connector between the organic and the human-made, the perks of consumer culture, and the stalemates of conspicuous consumption.
The show’s title is taken from Irish playwright and Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett’s 1962 novel of the same name. The eponymous sculpture (2024), one of Wurm's more complex works, belongs to the series of One Minute Sculptures that the artist began in late 1990s. This series offers the audience the possibility to transform themselves into a living sculpture by following the artist’s specific instructions and performing simple exercises with everyday objects. A selection of One Minute Sculptures is complemented by several photographs titled One Minute Photographs, showing the sculptures in the state of activation.
At the center of the exhibition is the iconic sculpture Fat Convertible (2005) – an exaggeratedly distorted sports car whose bloated form is both paradoxical and unsettling. The work reflects on questions of status symbols, consumer culture, and bodily perception, without offering a straightforward critique. Instead, Wurm transforms everyday objects through formal exaggeration into sculptural commentaries on the relationship between humans and objects.
The most recent series in the show, Substitutes (2024), continues Wurm’s long-standing interest in clothing as a way to explore the concept of volume. The monumental scale of Substitutes, made from thin sheets of painted aluminum, presents the garments as having character in themselves, detached from the wearer’s personality.
The show also includes Flat Sculptures – paintings in which words or letters are treated like sculptural objects within the pictorial space. The artist is less interested in the message conveyed by the letters than in their form, materiality, and visual presence within the image.
The series Attacks (2021–2022) presents sculptures that replicate the homes of prominent philosophers, such as Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and are distorted by everyday objects. These works are not intended primarily as critique, but rather as absurd confrontations between two opposing systems: intellectual abstraction and material excess — with a critical dimension in the case of Heidegger and his connection to the NSDAP.
Other works in the exhibition showcase Erwin Wurm’s extensive vocabulary of forms to exceptional effect, combining a philosophical pursuit of fundamental questions about the human condition with a taste for ironic and absurd juxtapositions.
Portrait © Erwin Wurm, Bildrecht Wien, 2025 Photographer: Lottermann und Fuentes
Erwin Wurm lives and works in Vienna and Limberg, Austria. He has twice participated in the Venice Biennale, representing Austria in 2017. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions around the world, including Vancouver Art Gallery (2019), Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2020), Suwon Museum of Art (2022), Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2023), SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2023–24), Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2023–24), Albertina Modern (2024–2025), and Towada Art Center, Japan (2025), as well as Marmorschlössl, Bad Ischl (2025), among many others.
