July 7 to September 3, 2017
MKM Museum Küppersmühle for Modern Art, Duisburg

July 7 – October 29, 2017
Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg

With Erwin Wurm (born 1954), the MKM Museum Küppersmühle and the Lehmbruck Museum are presenting one of the most important sculptors of the present day. In a comprehensive survey exhibition, the two Duisburg art museums are jointly showing sculptures, photographs, wallpapers, knitted objects, videos, the famous One Minute Sculptures and some works created especially for the exhibition by the Austrian artist, who is currently representing his home country at the 57th Venice Biennale.

At the MKM, Erwin Wurm has made 90 meters of wall disappear under bright green knitted fabric. The result is a fascinating, monumental work of art that has never been seen before and combines classic sculptural questions about body and object, volume and emptiness with a huge, brightly colored wool surface.

Looking like painting from a distance, the work is also reminiscent of color field painting as it developed in America from the mid-1950s. To even begin to grasp the work, the viewer has to walk through five exhibition rooms. The spatial effect in its entirety nevertheless eludes us time and again.

Working with banal materials such as wool, but also with symbolic objects, has always been one of the central components of the Austrian artist’s work. Sweaters become wall sculptures, an oversized boxing glove bears tire tracks, watermelons apparently kill a trader at the market. People, passers-by or museum visitors, are often included. All this and more from Wurm’s sculptural universe is on display in the exhibition at the MKM until September 3, 2017.

ERWIN WURM is an exhibition project of the MKM Museum Küppersmühle and the Lehmbruck Museum. The Foundation for Art and Culture is responsible for the exhibition at the MKM. The project is made possible by the generous support of Evonik Industries AG (for the MKM) and the Sparkasse Duisburg and Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Rheinland (for the Lehmbruck Museum).

Photos: Georg Lukas, Essen