1) : Bar, 2019, bronze, patina, table, alcohol bottle, glass, 182 x 140 x 60 Museum Jorn, Silkeborg cm, 8.6.-1.9.2019 © Erwin Wurm 2019

ERWIN WURM 2) Erwin Wurm: One Minute Sculpture The Discipline of Subjectivity (Double Bucket), 1999, performed at Tate Modern in 2017, Foto: Roman März, © Erwin Wurm 2019

‘My work addresses the drama of existential indifference. Whether approaching it through philosophy or diet, one inevitably ends up getting the worst of it […] By staging absurd and paradoxical situations, I want to sharpen people’s views on the circumstances governing life and everyday living.’

The summer exhibition ERWIN WURM - The Discipline of Subjectivity sheds light on the internationally acclaimed Austrian performance and installation artist Erwin Wurm’s (b.1954) concept of sculpture with its multiple facets and audience interaction.

For more than two decades, Erwin Wurm has entertained international audiences with his humorous sculptural interventions in public spaces. During the 1990s, he attracted considerable attention with his One Minute Sculptures, encouraging viewers, duly assisted by guidelines, to interact with everyday objects such as chairs, clothes, or detergents in absurd positions, thereby becoming part of the performative-sculptural installation themselves. Other sensational works by the artist include his full-scale, zany elongated, crooked, and distorted houses, ships, and cars, mobilising a twisted and satirical view of bourgeois status symbols.

Erwin Wurm’s works often apply a simple pictorial language taken from popular culture, indicating broad, easy, and playful accessibility. Yet, as satirical artistic-philosophical ’pitfalls’, the works surprise the audience with an alternative and, at times, cynical focus on everyday banalities and individual perceptions of reality.

The exhibition at Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, presents a large selection of different sculptures, providing a glimpse into the humorous and subtle aesthetic universe of Erwin Wurm. The works on show include bronzes, film sculptures, photographic sculptures, performative sculptures, drinking sculptures, and several of the famed interactive One Minute Sculptures encouraging visitors to take an active part.

With the programmatic exhibition title, The Discipline of Subjectivity, Erwin Wurm references the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s absurd descriptions of truth via untruths. The academic title sounds like an ironic scientific treatment of the individual perspective while, at the same time, concluding that all attempts at analytical objectification of reality are based on a variety of incompatible individual perceptions of same.

Thanks to Erwin Wurm’s great responsiveness, Museum Jorn is now able to present a number of new works from the artist’s studio never previously shown in public. Moreover, the exhibition offers some of Erwin Wurm’s most prominent works, generously loaned to us from private owners, museums, and galleries.

Erwin Wurm lives and works in and Limberg, Lower . His physically interactive and mentally challenging art has been shown at countless acclaimed international exhibition venues worldwide. Wurm’s art is, for example, part of the collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the , Paris, and the National Museum of Art, Osaka. Furthermore, Erwin Wurm represented Austria at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.

The exhibition is under the patronage of the Ambassador of Austria in Denmark.