Erwin Wurm: ONE MINUTE FOREVER

Curators: Maja Kolarić and Jérôme Sans 

Erwin Wurm’s exhibition ONE MINUTE FOREVER at the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade will be the first major solo exhibition of one of Austria’s most prominent contemporary artists in Serbia. Spread over the five floors of the museum, it will be a survey of twenty years of practice, presenting a body of work from 1993 to the present, as well as significant new productions.

One of the most important artists of his generation, Erwin Wurm is internationally recognized for his unique way of having reinvented sculpture through performance, video, drawing and photography. In the 1990s, Wurm made a name for himself with the One Minute Sculptures, an ongoing iconic and now historical series of photographed performances in which he subjects his models or himself to paradoxical, cynical or absurd contortions and situations.

This comprehensive exhibition thought as an introspective rather than a retrospective is a major event both for the museum and for the artist. It will show his entire vocabulary from the beginning, including his photographs, installations, sculptures and iconic performances that will be performed by the public, giving the show a playful, inclusive and participatory dimension.

ONE MINUTE FOREVER focuses on interweaving of past and present contexts, of individual and collective experiences, a large reactivation of iconic performative sculptures, converging towards a unique aim: redefining, extending and twisting sculpture into a resolutely participative and playful medium, capable of questioning our way of being and looking at the world.

The exhibition features some of Wurm’s seminal and the most recognizable works dealing with the consumerism and state of capitalist society such as Fat Convertible and Fat House. Opposing the pompousness of these works underlining the moral obesity of the Western World, the Narrow House stands tall depicting the current (and future) scarcity of space in the ever-evolving cities, thus providing the potential dystopic image of future living spaces.  The Narrow House is Erwin Wurm’s memory of his family home and the era he was born into: post Second World War times when society was rigid and closed and projecting into today’s permanent process of the reduction of personal living spaces due to continued density of population on our planet. 

To complement his autobiographical and critical approach to art, Wurm is also well-known for the absurdity embedded in his works as seen in his piece Self-portrait as Cucumbers which takes on the robustness of European Union’s bureaucracy and strange standardization of the curve of cucumbers produced in the European Union; or text sculpture From L to XXL in 8 Days, an inverse and critical take on the today’s world’s obsession with body image.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade is delighted to show the premier of locally produced Performative Sculptures, featuring some of the most prominent buildings dating to the mid-century Modernism of Yugoslavia. These ephemeral sculptures made of unfired clay serve as the pedestals for performances underlining the expressive possibilities of sculpture, bearing the trace of co-existence between the rigid forms of architecture and living beings.

The title ONE MINUTE FOREVER might sound like an oxymoron but it also serves as a celebration of the breakthrough series of Erwin Wurm’s work. In reality, the One Minute Sculptures, Wurm’s mixture of ready-made and Fluxus scores, are the ultimate participatory artworks of the transition from the 20th to the 21st century. These ready-mades “constantly ready to be made” invite audiences to take part in a one-minute interaction with a probability that this experience will be remembered forever.

For more inquiries about One minute forever pls contact: Slavica Pesic, Public Relations, slavica@msub.org.rs.