Erwin Wurm’s pop-coloured fantasy land at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

The rolling hills of Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) have become a cabinet of pop-coloured curiosities for Erwin Wurm’s first UK museum show. 

The Austrian artist is known for shattering the rules of sculpture. Turning familiar objects on their heads with bizarre interventions (think Fat Cars, wearable(ish) furniture, warped buildings and anthropomorphic hot water bottles) – Wurm mines ideas from all that surrounds us, and bends those truths into full-blown fantasy. Aptly, the exhibition’s title, ‘Trap of the Truth’, refers to the work of 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, who set out to interrogate the subjectivity of truth. 

‘Sculpture is always about space and scale. Exhibiting my work in the great landscape of Yorkshire Sculpture Park gives my work a very new dimension,’ Wurm explains to Wallpaper*. ‘My work plays with the absurd to raise social and philosophical issues. The way it is perceived always depends on the cultural context. The exhibition at YSP is the largest show I have ever held in the UK, and I am really curious to see how the British public will respond to it.’ 

Laden with humour and with frequent nods to the dominance of commodity culture, as well as his Austria’s cultural identity (mostly food), Wurm’s new Yorkshire Sculpture Park show will feature more than 100 works (several shown for the first time), including 55 sculptures indoors, 19 sculptures in the landscape, paintings, photographs, videos and drawings created over the artist’s 30-year career. Among the works on show will be Wurm’s Bags series, including the 5m-tall, Step (Big) (2021), which takes the form of the Hermès Birkin bag, and Dance (2021) and Trip (2021) – a briefcase and suitcase respectively – fashioned with long, dynamic legs that look like they might stride across the landscape. Elsewhere, an unseen 3.2m-tall bronze work Balzac (2023) references a Rodin sculpture, and Der Gurk (2016) immortalises the most iconic of Austrian foods (also the key ingredient of Wurm’s deep-fried gherkin dish, shared with Wallpaper* for our artist’s recipe series). 

As Clare Lilley, director of Yorkshire Sculpture Park explains, ‘Erwin Wurm’s sculpture will be a riot of expression and colour against the green Yorkshire landscape and in the galleries. His imaginative powers are limitless, and we hope that visitors will be inspired, energised, confounded, and amused by sculptures that portray familiar objects but in a way that is entirely unexpected. Couture handbags grow long legs and arms and have real attitude; a 4m-high hot water bottle becomes a big, warm mother; a real truck bends and climbs a gallery wall; a gigantic gherkin stands proud.

Wurm draws attention to the ways in which humans conform to society’s demands, to the psychological impact of contemporary culture, and to how we use history and tradition to scaffold our lives.’ 

Erwin Wurm: 'Trap of the Truth', 10 June 2023 – 28 April 2024. ysp.org.uk