“Dream” Installation view at Lehmann Maupin, Seoul. ©Lehmann MaupinLehmann Maupin, Seoul will present Dream, a solo exhibition of new and recent works by Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm (b. 1954), from May 11 to June 24. This exhibition returns to Seoul more than two months after the artist’s largest solo exhibition in Korea at the Suwon Museum of Art in March.
Known for his human-sized pickles, a house compressed to one meter in width, and the audience-participation series One Minute Sculpture, Erwin Wurm has been exploring the concept and fundamental principles of sculptures for over 25 years. Questioning what can and should be sculpture, the artist explores the medium’s exciting new possibilities through explorations of volume, mass, surface, color, and time.
The exhibition will feature new works including a series of paintings called ‘Flat Sculptures’ and sculptures called ‘Skins’ as well as ‘Bag Sculptures’ and ‘Abstract Sculptures’ that anthropomorphize bags.
The artist’s new series, ‘Skins’ are cast aluminum and painted white, forming body parts of fictional characters, each with a specific gesture or posture. The series is a stark illustration of the artist’s increasingly abstract practice. The ‘Flat Sculptures’ series from 2021 depicts voluminous three-dimensional forms that when pressed to the limit, become flat. The artist inflates and distorts selected words to the point of illegibility, filling the screen.
In addition, in the ‘Abstract Sculptures’ series, sausages made of bronze are anthropomorphized with attached arms and legs, and the objects that seem to be imbued with human emotions show the precarious boundary between humanity and objectivity. By presenting a wide range of the artist’s works and representative works, the exhibition sheds light on his sculptural practice, and throughout this exhibition he continues to experiment with the nature of sculpture, expanding the horizons of new forms and concepts.
