Fat Survival

Erwin Wurm, one of Austria's most important and internationally famous sculptors, has been preoccupied with expanding the concept of sculpture since the eighties. In his "One Minute Sculptures", for example - temporary, grotesquely comic works - he invites the spectator to become a sculpture, even providing various kinds of accessories for the purpose. What remains are photographs or videos showing a single moment in the short life of these sculptures. Erwin Wurm's utilization of the media of photography and video is highly distinctive and enables him to include not only the classical parameters of sculpture - gravity, weight, static equilibrium, stability, materiality, form - but additionally the parameter of time. Human bodies in combination with objects and positions they can only hold only for a few moments are an ideal means of extending sculpture into the realm of the media. This volume, illustrated mainly in colour, provides a condensed survey of Erwin Wurm's work since the early nineties.