Erwin Wurm’s first UK show transforms Yorkshire Sculpture Park into a colourful fantasy land.

Featuring more than 100 works, including 55 sculptures indoors, 19 sculptures in the landscape, paintings, photographs, videos and drawings Trap of the Truth by one of Austria’s most prominent artists opened last Saturday 10th June 2023,

Over three decades Erwin Wurm, who came to prominence in the 1990s with his One Minute Sculptures has challenged the rules of sculpture, the limitations of the human body, and its relationship to the spaces we inhabit. His playful work experimental work disrupts perceptions of the familiar as he frequently reimagines commonplace objects by giving them human characteristics.

The exhibition title Trap of the Truth refers to the thinking of influential 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, who set out to interrogate the subjectivity of truth. This questioning of reality is immortalised in the phrase “I think, therefore I am”.

Wurm ponders what sculpture is and what it can be, stretching its boundaries, calling into question the value and importance we place on everyday objects and addressing how we conform to society’s demands.

Outdoors, 19 sculptures occupy YSP’s heritage landscape, including new and never-before-seen works. Three sculptures from Wurm’s Bags series explore consumer culture and objects of status. They include the five-metre-tall, pastel blue Big Step(2021), which takes the form of the Hermès Birkin bag, a contemporary symbol of prestige and wealth, and is personified with long elegant legs appearing to be walking purposefully. Dance (2021) and Trip (2021) – a briefcase and suitcase respectively – complete the series, with their long, dynamic legs giving a sense of human life within the landscape.

Big Kastenmann (2012), which translates as ‘big box man,’ stands at five metres tall, with a large box for a torso wearing a formal pink and grey suit jacket. This was Wurm’s first large-scale public art project, displayed outside The Standard Hotel in New York City in 2012. His 3.2-metre-tall bronze Balzac (2023) will be shown for the first time – the majestic human form created by elaborate layers of robes reminiscent of ancient classical statuary and referencing Rodin’s sculpture of the same name.

Drawing on his nation’s historic and cultural identity, Wurm interprets popular Austrian food items, the most iconic of which is the gherkin, or pickled cucumber, while three of Wurm’s Giants from the Abstract Sculptures series (2014-18), are anthropomorphised bronze sausages that reference the wiener hot dog. In the Underground Gallery, a selection of over 50 sculptures unravels the complexities of Wurm’s practice, alongside 60 two-dimensional works illustrating the artist’s prolific drawing practice in pen, crayon, and watercolour.

The earliest gallery work is Renault 25 from 1991. It is a full-size adapted Renault 25 car that has been reformed on a tilt, as though distorted by cornering at speed. This reference to animation, comic-book illustration and popular culture sets the scene for Wurm’s inclination to the absurd and desire to undermine conformity.

In Gallery One, works from Wurm’s Attacks and Concrete Sculptures series reference philosophers, psychologists and thinkers from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Such intellectuals are frequently memorialised by their houses or cabins and Wurm continues this notion of lionising spaces for solitude by representing his own workspace with the aluminium Eiswerk – My Studio (The Kitchen and Bedroom Hanging Down) (2005), an irrational and self-deprecating representation of his home and studio in Limberg, Austria.

The ConcreteSculptures from 2022 take what appear to be fragments of demolished structures, including iron wire, wood and stone, and merges them with cast-concrete forms of houses and cars. The 2022 Attacks are bronze and aluminium buildings and cars that have been squashed by oversized sausages and bananas in a humorous, yet discomforting manner. A 5.6-metre-long Mercedes truck shows the vast variation in scale with which Wurm works, and the bright red bending Truck II (2011) appears to have reversed up the gallery wall where it rests, precariously.

Completing the exhibition are six Flat Sculptures – oil on canvas works that the artist started painting 2020.

Supported by Thaddaeus Ropac and Lehmann Maupin – Erwin Wurm: ‘Trap of the Truth’, 10 June 2023 – 28 April 2024

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