Erwin Wurm

Weil am Rhein

As Erwin Wurm’s oeuvre typifies the continuing impact of Pop Art and popular culture on the work of many artists and designers up to the present, Vitra Design Museum Gallery shows an exhibition on the Austrian-born artist parallel to Pop Art Design.

Erwin Wurm is a leading figure in contemporary art. His exaggerations of everyday objects such as cars, fashion and furniture capture our attention with a humour and wit that only at second glance reveals the profound emotional and cultural significance of these things. The manipulation of images so omnipresent in the electronic media suddenly takes form in real space with Wurm’s ambiguous objects. The delight in the persiflage quickly shifts to an awareness of the compulsive inevitability with which we define ourselves and others through symbolically laden possessions.

‚Drowsy‘ is an example of Wurm’s latest series of works in which models of houses were deformed by way of physical force, the artist links surrealist methods with Actionism and happenings. Wallpaper designed especially for this exhibition shows house and home as a psychogram and depicts Wurm’s current position on this theme in a larger context. The dialogue between museum and applied art explored by the Pop Art Design exhibitionis thus traced up to the present with these works. Typical Pop themes such as the loss of hierarchies, the distortion of dimensions and the interpenetration of art and everyday life reappear here as symptoms of a state of being that has now become the norm with profound contemporary relevance.

Erwin Wurm

Vitra Design Museum

September 14th, 2012 – January 20th, 2013
Charles-Eames-Straße 2
79576 Weil am Rhein
Germany

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