Erwin Wurm
Beauty Business
December 1, 2011–March 4, 2012
Bass Museum of Art
2100 Collins Ave
Miami Beach, FL 33139
Hours:
Noon–5pm, Wednesday–Sunday
305.673.7530
The Bass Museum of Art is pleased to announce its upcoming solo exhibition of works by artist Erwin Wurm. The exhibition, titled Erwin Wurm: Beauty Business, opens December 1st, 2011 during Art Basel Miami Beach. Wurm, an artist living and working in Vienna, combines various art forms: sculpture, photography and performance into a unique personal view of the everyday world. Drawing on history, humor and philosophy, Wurm creates light-hearted artworks with at times serious messages. His new large sculptural works which have a grand theatrical scale and were created specifically for this exhibition, invite the viewer to interact and participate. Wurm’s smaller-scale Drinking Sculpture series set-up the possibility for visitors to engage with the alcoholic spirits located in each work. These artworks hark to cliché scenarios of hiding alcohol bottles in furniture for private consumption.Wurm’s well-known sweater pieces, in the format of large-scale wall works, blur the boundary between human form and the museum building. With the sweater works, Wurm alludes to dressing a portion of the museum for warmth and security. A series of smaller sweater sculptures also incorporate fashion—the sweater forms are stretched and altered by crude wooden braces. These altered works transform the visitor’s view of the sweater forms into the present moment, leaving any history, which can be at times painful, and the future, at best illusionary, out of the experience. Additionally, “hoodie” works push the human form and showcase how balance can be found within the gallery spaces.
Beauty Business, the name of a comic book Wurm hid in different locations in his childhood bedroom away from his parents, connects all of his interests in performance, domestic architecture, forms and personal history. Beauty Business is Wurm’s first cohesive focus on the home or dwelling. As architect Le Corbusier once remarked, the purpose of architecture is to move us. In his art, Wurm consistently realizes architecture’s highest aim as he creates works whose extraordinary power lies not only in how deeply they make us feel, but also in how they let us see the complexity of our feelings, in meaningful environments, which help us to dwell.
Wurm’s greatest insights as an artist are his belief that our feelings about such locations are often mixed, that we are often drawn to what both attracts and repels us—these are things the artist understands intuitively. If in the space surrounding his objects we experience our own ambivalence about certain issues more intensely, it is because of the way, in theme and structure, his work so elegantly holds contradictory elements in tension.
Erwin Wurm: Beauty Business will be on view during Art Basel Miami Beach 2011. Special museum hours will be: Thursday, December 1 through Sunday, December 4, 2011, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and regular museum hours thereafter. The exhibition runs through March 4, 2012.
This exhibition is produced in collaboration with Dallas Contemporary, Texas and curated by Peter Doroshenko, the Director of Dallas Contemporary. It will be on view at Dallas Contemporary from April 14 through August 19, 2012.
Additional support for this exhibition was made possible by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris and Salzburg; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York.
About Erwin Wurm:
Known for his uniquely humorous approach to formalism, Wurm’s multi-disciplinary works have appeared in exhibitions throughout the world. Erwin Wurm has exhibited extensively with shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, (2005); Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France, (2007); Konstmuseum Malmö, Sweden, (2008); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, (2008); the Moscow Biennial (2009); Ullens Center of Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2010); Kunstmuseum Bonn (2010); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010). The artist just recently revealed NARROW HOUSE at the 54th Venice Biennale, Italy (June 2011).
Works by Wurm are included in prestigious collections throughout the world at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland; Musèe d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, Lyon, France; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, among others.
About the Bass Museum of Art
Located in Miami Beach, the Bass Museum of Art offers a dynamic year-round calendar of exhibitions exploring the connections between contemporary art and works of art from its permanent collection of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, sculpture, textiles, Apulian vases and Egyptian artifacts. Artists’ projects, educational programs, lectures, concerts and free family days complement the works on view. Last December, the museum selected internationally acclaimed Oppenheim Architecture + Design to lead its first phase of design and renovation tied to the 2010 completion of Miami Beach’s Collins Park. Oppenheim redesigned and relocated the museum’s arrival area to flow from and into the new park on Collins Avenue. For more information, please visit www.bassmuseum.org.
The Bass Museum of Art is generously funded by the City of Miami Beach, Cultural Affairs Program, Cultural Arts Council; Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; and sponsored in part by the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture and the Friends of the Bass Museum.
Bass Museum of Art
2100 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Hours: Noon–5pm, Wednesday–Sunday
Info: 305.673.7530 or www.bassmuseum.org
*Image above:
Courtesy of the artist; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg and Paris; and Lehmann Maupin, New York.
