Erwin Wurm – a winner at art auctions

Auction houses and art auctions are currently a hot topic, and as a result, more and more art buyers and art lovers are interested in the mechanisms that make a particular artist's works especially successful and expensive at auction . However, people who connect with art more through curiosity and passion than commercial interest can still enjoy art without such knowledge.

But there's probably a little gambler in all of us, and even those who buy art because they love it don't mind that a work of art they've acquired might appreciate considerably in value over time. The emerging investors who believe their money is safer in art than in stocks naturally want to try to uncover the secret behind these high prices.

In this context, it is certainly interesting to take a closer look at the artists whose works fetch such high prices at the world's leading auctions. Erwin Wurm has been one of these artists for several years; here is an overview of his life and work:

Erwin Wurm – Life and Work

The Austrian artist was born on July 27, 1954, in Bruck an der Mur, the district capital of Styria. With around 12,500 inhabitants, Bruck an der Mur is a rather tranquil place that, apart from the chamber music hall, the local history museum, and the choir, didn't offer the young Erwin Wurm much in the way of artistic inspiration. His father, a police detective, was also reportedly not thrilled when his son showed interest in art as a profession.

In any case, the young Wurm initially aspired to a civil service position, first studying art history and German studies in neighboring Graz. However, he then switched to the Mozarteum Salzburg , where he studied art and design education from 1977 to 1979, and from Salzburg his path led him to Vienna, to the University of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts.

Until 1982 he studied design theory in the field of sculpture under Bazon Brock ; depending on when he graduated from high school, he thus had eight to ten years of artistic training behind him.

Wurm began his artistic career in the early 1980s with sculptures made of sheet metal and wood , and with all sorts of artistically transformed everyday objects, which he coated with lead and/or paint. Over time, his concept of sculpture became freer; he increasingly dispensed with solid materials and stability.

This expanded understanding of the concept of sculpture is embodied (or perhaps not embodied) in, for example, a series of “dust objects” (in short: rectangles with dusty surfaces). Over the past three decades of his work, Erwin Wurm has explored, with countless other imaginative ideas, the boundaries that separate sculptures from actions and actions from performances, or indeed, do not separate them.

Wurm's self-created concept of sculpture reaches its provisional culmination after a decisive life crisis. Within a year, Wurm loses all his close relatives: both his parents die, his wife leaves him and takes both sons with her.

He expressed this idea in the 1990s in a series of “One Minute Sculptures” , in which he had exhibition visitors pose together with everyday objects in the exhibition, thus becoming part of a sculpture that existed only briefly and was documented only by a photograph.

Like many famous artists, Erwin Wurm returned to the place of his training; since 2002 he had been a professor of sculpture, three-dimensional art, and multimedia art . He is no longer teaching there, as Wurm himself states, because he is too busy with life and work in Vienna and New York to be able to teach the students properly.

How and where did Erwin Wurm experience his “breakthrough”?

If you ask Erwin Wurm himself, he says there hasn't really been such a breakthrough; he's been able to live off his art for many years. In fact, Wurm was invited to his first group exhibition as early as 1982, and in 1984 he had his first solo exhibition at this gallery (Galerie nächst St. Stephan), and since then the number of his exhibitions has increased year after year, quite steadily.

Wurm himself explains his success in a very likeable way: Lasting artistic success can only be achieved if the works contain an element that fascinates not only one generation, but also the next.

It's best not to think about it at all

, he also says, and “I have no illusions, tomorrow it could all be over for me too.” ( derstandard.at/ ), and that probably refers more to what is commonly understood as a “breakthrough”, namely a period of rather unexpected and astonishing financial success.

How this breakthrough came about for the artist Erwin Wurm cannot be precisely determined; in any case, his “One Minute Sculptures” made him known to the public beyond the specifically interested art circles.

It certainly helped that these “One Minute Sculptures” were featured in the Red Hot Chili Peppers' 2003 music video for their single “Can't Stop,” and that creator and inspiration Erwin Wurm was also mentioned in the video. But the enjoyment that awaits visitors at his exhibitions also undoubtedly plays a role; this experiential aspect of his work has also become widely known.

Erwin Wurm – known worldwide today for interesting and amusing exhibitions

Perhaps word of the quirky humor often associated with Wurm's work began to spread with the 2006 exhibition at the MUMOK (Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation) Fittingly titled "Keep a Cool Head," the exhibition "House Attack" —a slanted and upside-down detached house, then still in its original size, which certainly caused quite a stir.

For example, in 2009 Wurm's exhibition “Desperate Philosophers” on display at the Xavier Hufkens Gallery “Suit” and philosophical works such as the “Melting House I” , the melting house (which it does) and the “Big Gulp” , which really does look like a big gulp.

In 2010, Wurm exhibited another headless philosopher named Cajetan, along with other works of equally understated yet profound depth, at the Lenbachhaus (Städtische Galerie) in Munich. The Kunstmuseum Bonn is showing works from 2007 to 2009, with telling titles such as “Do not have doubts” or, more broadly, aptly named, like the model of his childhood home, now reduced lengthwise to about one-sixth of its original size.

In the same year, Wurm's similar and completely novel works, such as the "Self-Portrait as a Pickle" or the "Telekinetic Masturbator" , were also exhibited in Groningen (Netherlands), Florence, Salzburg, New York and Beijing.

In 2011, the project continued with headless figures at the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in Paris, with folding bed installations in the exhibition “I am Erwin Wurm” (and precisely this lettering as an exhibited artwork) in Copenhagen, with new “Self-Portrait as Pickles” and new “Narrow Houses” in Odense (also Denmark) and Dornbirn (Austria), and many mysterious pieces of furniture in Vienna (“Schöner Wohnen”).

A “Narrow House” by Wurm was subsequently on display at the 54th Venice Biennale , effectively presented outdoors on one of the canals.

When Erwin Wurm exhibited his beautiful and rather touching sculptures ( “Small Psychos Groups” ) at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag after the Biennale, critics hailed him as one of the most important contemporary artists. His “Fat House,” ; it really does look fat, involuntarily bringing to mind the overweight, much-taunted boy in one's school class.

Several more “Fat” sculptures are planned, in which all the petit-bourgeois status symbols that have replaced the prosperity belly of yesteryear will be “fatted” or inflated: primarily various sports cars and single-family homes, but sometimes also incredibly inflated men (whom most people probably think of as stockbrokers).

In 2012 there are more “Gulps” , but they all look like a Gulp: “Knitted walls” , which are just knitted and hanging on the wall, enchanting “boxes” and rather bent “Drinking Sculptures” ( “Beauty Business” at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, USA), all of these can also be seen in Dallas, in Malaga there are many new delicacies to be seen, including various designs on the theme of “Narrow House” .

Until the end of January 2013, Wurm's work was on display at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, featuring a new installation and two "Melting Houses," which had already melted quite a bit – however, it seems he doesn't actually need melting houses for his ideas.

Now you want the author to finally explain to you properly what kind of art Erwin Wurm creates? Forgive me, but I will do that… firstly, of course, out of sheer incompetence, and secondly, out of pure respect for the artist.

I already have a lot of ideas that I would ask him to implement if I dared… perhaps one of the many terribly clumsily dressed politicians as a “Melting Politician” , an actor who emigrated to Russia because of taxes as a “Fat Freaky God” , a judge of a South German Higher Regional Court as a head-searching philosopher, or the chairman of a local club as a “Narrow Mind”… I am sure that some ideas immediately spring to mind for you as well.

In any case, Erwin Wurm is probably a pretty good example of the artists whose works one should look at a little longer and more comprehensively, because the eye might not immediately grasp all the imagination, all the humor, all the quirkiness or all the cynicism.

But eventually he does, and eventually you understand better and better why Erwin Wurm just received the Austrian State Prize, why he now moved up to 30th place on the ranking list of “commercial art” and why the majority of critics rank him among the 20 most important artists worldwide .

If you've just read a series of comments from small-minded people who think that their little niece could do something like Wurm (who, by the way, will never get the chance; small-minded people don't let their children create art): Take a look at Erwin Wurm himself and see for yourself.

Lina Sahne

Passionate author with a keen interest in art

www.kunstplaza.de