PARIS.- Throughout his career, Wurm has sought to deconstruct sculpture, expanding its spatial and temporal dimensions as well as exploring questions of weight and volume.

In Skins, the artist takes a new approach, focusing on the notion of surface and its function in holding and defining volume. Featuring his most recent series of sculptures titled Skin, the exhibition also offers an exclusive look at the Flat Sculptures, which represent the artist’s first foray into painting.

Two dimensionality, three dimensionality, mass, skin, surface, volume are important parts of my research on sculpture.

Squeezed and flattened or reduced to a very thin form, my new works have a certain fragility, which I like: they become almost abstract. — Erwin Wurm, 2022

‘As a sculptor, I’m interested in the idea of skin as a boundary,’ declared Wurm in a 2014 interview with the New York Times. This idea began with the artist’s observation of ancient bronze sculptures, which are hollow, unlike their marble counterparts, defined only by a thin membrane that separates the space inside the sculpture from the air around it. Clothing is similarly like a second skin, a shell that separates our bodies from the outside world. In the Skin sculptures and throughout Wurm’s career, it has therefore constituted a major theme for the artist.

In the Skin sculptures, the artist’s relationship to his models forms an important part of the work. Boundary-pushing performer Lars Eidinger, who has long been a close collaborator of Wurm’s, posed for over an hour in order for this cast of his body to be made. The result is a precarious-looking form, seemingly frozen in time. Suspended between presence and absence, it points to existential questions regarding our interaction with the world around us and the role of skin as the site for this encounter.

Twisting around an invisible form, the sinewy slices of an absent, fully clothed body appear at once poetic, unnerving and absurd. As though frozen in time, they resemble afterimages of the artist’s One Minute Sculptures for which he became known in the 1990s. In them, Wurm gave participants a set of instructions for actions they had to perform for a short time, often interacting with mundane objects. He recorded many of these ephemeral sculptures through photographs.

The titles of the Flat Sculptures, which correspond to the words inscribed on the canvas, ‘stone’, ‘wurst’, ‘melt’ or ‘clay’, reference the artist’s past series of works, including the Stone Sculptures, Fat Cars and sausage-like Abstract Sculptures.

The title of this painting references Wurm’s 1991 video 13 Pullover, featuring his friend, Austrian artist Fabio Zolly, in the process of layering on thirteen jumpers. This action altered Zolly’s shape as well as making the flat garments three-dimensional. At the same time, this caused them to lose their functionality.

Similarly, the letters in Pullover (2021) are stretched and squeezed to occupy the entire surface of the canvas. This makes them almost illegible save for the small portions of contrasting ground that appear between them, but allows them to acquire body and become almost tangible in the process.

Painted in contrasting shades of cream and blue, the palette of Foam (2022) forms a kind of membrane as the artist extends the planes of colour to cover the sides of the canvas. The letters on the canvas, which correspond to the titles of the paintings, seem, as the artist describes, ‘to have been rolled flat and changed their form into amorphous structures.’ Here, one can make out the word ‘foam’, referring to the material the artist uses to create his famous Fat Cars and Fat Houses.

Although Wurm is known today as a pioneering sculptor, as a student he had been more interested in painting. It wasn’t until the summer of 2021, during a stay in Greece with his friend, the Austrian painter and engraver Hans Weigand, that he started painting again. ‘At first I thought it would just be a pastime for a few weeks,’ Wurm stated in an interview with journalist Larissa Kikol. ‘Then it intensified and now I paint all the time. It’s like therapy. Unbelievable.’