Erwin Wurm Photographs at the MEP, Paris.

March 3rd – June 7th, 2020
Erwin Wurm Photographs
MAISON EUROPEENNE DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE, Paris.
5/7 rue de Fourcy . 75004 Paris FRANCE
www.mep-fr.org/english/

Starting March 4, 2020, the MEP invites you to discover the work of the internationally acclaimed artist Erwin Wurm in a totally new light, in this first-ever retrospective of his photographic work. 

This Austrian artist is celebrated for a complex, conceptual body of work including sculpture, performance, video, drawing and photography in which he questions our relationship to the body with humour and cynicism, in artworks that combine playfulness, slapstick and a profound sense of the absurd. 

Gathering together some 200 prints produced since the 1990s and filling the museum’s two main floors, this extensive exhibition – the first to be seen inParis in many years – will present a number of prints and original contact sheets from the artist’s personal archives, never before seen by the public. Together they will show the unique role the medium plays in his work: much more than documented performances, photography is conceived by Wurm as a “sculptural” form of expression in its own right. Combining instruction-based works with more philosophical images, the exhibition will explore his process in such seminal works as “dust sculptures,” from the early 1990s, in which the artist placed an object on a surface, sprinkled dust over it, then removed it to show the residual imprints; and “Fabio Gets Dressed” (1992), inspired by his belief that the human body, with its capacity to fill a sweater, occupy space, gain or lose weight, is a sculpture in itself. “Instructions for Idleness” (2001), “How to Be Politically Incorrect” (2002- 2003), “Thinking About Philosophy” (2004), “Nudelskulpturen” (2016) and recent, large-format Polaroids will also be on display.
In addition to photographic works, videos and furniture, the exhibition will include his famous “One-Minute Sculptures,” incorporating interactive works in which visitors can themselves become living sculptures by following the artist’s instructions.