ERWIN WURM
HUMAN FORM

TOWADA ART CENTER, JAPAN
12 APRIL – 16 NOVEMBER 2025

The Towada Art Center will present Erwin Wurm’s first solo museum exhibition at a museum in Japan from Saturday, April 12, 2025, to Sunday, November 16, 2025. The Towada Art Center is the only institution in Japan with a permanent display of Wurm’s works, which include Fat Car and Fat House.Recognized as one of Austria’s most significant contemporary artists, Erwin Wurm redefines and expands the boundaries of sculpture, employing a wide range of media—from traditional materials like plaster and metal to photography, clothing, and paint.In this exhibition, Wurm will explore the human body, one of the most fundamental sculptural motifs, through themes of time, volume and surface, figuration, and representation. The human form, shaped by external influences such as clothing, furniture, language, and social ideologies, is depicted as fragile, mutable, and filled with boundless possibilities. Often absurd and paradoxical, Wurm’s works expose the structures underlying social norms, institutions, and power.

© All photos Yukihito Kono 

The exhibition will feature the Japan premiere of Wurm’s latest large-scale installation, School (2024), along with recent key works from his Skins and Flat Sculptures series.

FEATURED ARTIST

ERWIN WURM
Erwin Wurm (b. 1954 in Bruck an der Mur, Austria) lives and works in Vienna. His oeuvre comprises sculptures, photography, video, performance, and painting. His works often involve everyday objects such as cars, houses, clothing, luxury bags, and food products, with which he ironically comments on consumerism and capitalist mass production. Wurm gained widespread popularity in the 1990s with his “One Minute Sculptures”. Museum pedestals are displayed and left devoid of any work, so that the audience can take the place of the sculpture for one minute, according to the artist’s whimsical instructions. With this ironic yet radical gesture, Wu...
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