VIENNA.- The Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig presents Erwin Wurm - Keep a Cool Head, on view through February 11, 2007. Born in 1954 in Bruck an der Mur, Austria, Erwin Wurm has always been involved in a question and answer game about sculpture and the way it is constituted. A multifaceted oeuvre has emerged over twenty-five years, which can be regarded as a continual investigation about the definition of sculpture. For Wurm, who is one of the most successful contemporary Austrian artists, actions, written or drawn instructions or even thoughts can become sculpture. This retrospective show presents for the first time, and on such a large scale, Wurm’s comprehensive oeuvre, which includes all forms of media and systems of reference.

House Attack is a stimulating installation that was realized especially for the museum’s façade: a single family house, not just a symbol of prosaicness and privateness but also of petty-mindedness, strikes the façade of the museum — the institutionalized temple of the muses — like a bomb.

In the most comprehensive exhibition to date, comprising over 400 works displayed on three floors of the museum, Wurm presents the extensive scope of his authorized production since 1994. The exhibition is centered around the voluminous sculptures from the Fat series, such as the most recent Truck (2006), Telekinetically bent VW-Van (2006) and The Artist who swallowed the world (2006), alongside numerous other ones that will be on exhibit for the first time. Erwin Wurm’s works often address elementary or banal needs, and psychological processes and their perversions, which can become manifest in physical deformations. While on the one hand he addresses the obsession with slimness or obesity, fashion, advertising and consumerism, whose main fetishes are the house or car, he is also concerned with giving material form to reflections on philosophy, politics and the art business. Wurm’s encyclopedia of sculptural figurations and formal constellations spans across his early minimalistic works, such as the dust sculptures and the earliest sculptural objects, to the most recent traditional sculptures and installations.

The two basic constants in Erwin Wurm’s reflections on sculpture are the ephemeral and the mutable, which he stages in his surprising transformations of everyday situations and absurd deformations of the human body and objects. His ideas, expressed in texts, drawings, videos and photographs, move within the fields of action, performance and sculpture.

With his famous One Minute Sculptures (1997), Erwin Wurm has invented a new genre of sculpture in which ritualized human actions are either altered or deconstructed for a brief, often hardly noticeable moment, producing a psychogram of complex subject-object relations. Exaggeration, paradoxical and grotesque elements serve to create disconcerting situations that seem to be confusing, astonishing, and amusing, whereby Wurm either leaves the sculpture to the actors or himself performs as in Carrying Edelbert Köb (Be nice to your curator) (2006) in which he carries the MUMOK’s director in his arms through the exhibition. In other works, however, it is the viewers who act out or follow his handling instructions. In Keep a cool head (2003), for instance, the exhibition visitors are expected to take his instructions quite literally and stick their heads into a fridge.

Erwin Wurm is a presentation made in collaboration with the Deichtor-hallen, Hamburg, the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and the Musée d´Art Contemporain de Lyon.

The artist’s book Erwin Wurm. The artist who swallowed the world, published in cooperation with the Kunstmuseum Aachen by Hatje Cantz Verlag, will appear in English with comments by the artist and an essay by the philosopher Robert Pfaller. The MUMOK will publish an inlay/addendum in English and German for the exhibition tour with texts by Edelbert Köb, Harald Kunde, Robert Fleck, Roland Wäspe, Thierry Davila and an interview with Erwin Wurm by Abraham Orden.

In Vienna, the exhibition Erwin Wurm is a contribution to the Monat der Fotografie 2006 [Month of Photography 2006] festival.