BEYOND LA
Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, Serbia
Erwin Wurm - One Minute Forever
April 7 - August 8, 2022
Special report from LAAD Field Correspondent Damir Kovacic
Wurm’s exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, titled One Minute Forever, is the first solo show of this major Austrian artist in Serbia and his first large-scale exhibition in the Balkans. Occupying all five floors of the Museum, the exhibition aims to showcase the artist’s complex creative oeuvre spanning thirty years, from the nineteen-nineties to the present.
Apart from his One Minute Sculptures mentioned above, the exhibition also features other iconic works by Wurm, such as Narrow House, Fat Car, Fat House, Abstract and Performative Sculptures, as well as all those additional media with which the artist constantly works and that constitute an indispensable part of his artistic vocabulary, such as photographs, video works, performances, drawings, and paintings, as well as his outstanding new productions for the Belgrade exhibition.
Specifically, Wurm has produced a new series of performative sculptures in clay, presenting models of the most important buildings belonging to the heritage of Yugoslav modernism in Belgrade. Rather introspective than retrospective in its conception, this exhibition attempts to present the rich and heterogeneous artistic oeuvre of Wurm as well as the diversity of the media in which he creates his works and simultaneously keeps developing and exploring.
One Minute Forever harbors a paradoxical synthesis of transience and eternity seeking to remind us of some of Wurm’s iconic One Minute and Performative Sculptures which, revived and re-performed on this occasion, only through the experience of participation generate the possibility and probability of their being remembered forever.
Erwin Wurm (*1954) is an Austrian artist based in Limberg, Austria, currently one of the most prominent artists on the global contemporary art scene. He acquired international renown with his unique approach to sculptural practice by demystifying and broadening the traditional notion of sculpture and reinventing it through performance art, video, photography, and drawing.
Wurm gained fame during the mid-nineteen-nineties precisely with his One Minute Sculptures series in which the artist subjects himself, the performers, and the audience to paradoxical or sometimes absurd situations that basically re-examine our usual forms of behavior and acquired habits, touching upon the most important existential questions. Wurm’s simple instructions and drawings encourage participation with an inclusive, entertaining, and socially participatory approach, simultaneously re-examining the hallowed conventions of sculptural tradition, turning the audience, through play, dance, and movement, into a one-minute sculpture itself.
Curators: Maja Kolarić and Jérôme Sans