ERWIN WURM
TRAP OF THE TRUTH

YORKSHIRE SCULPTURE PARK, WEST BRETTON, UK
10 JUNE 2023 – 28 APRIL 2024

TRAP OF THE TRUTH is a sprawling, solo exhibition of more than 100 works, including sculptures indoors, sculptures in the landscape, paintings, photographs, videos, and drawings created over 30 years of Erwin Wurm’s career at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Nineteen sculptures will be installed on the heritage landscape of the institution’s ground, including some new and never-before-seen works.

BIG KASTENMANN, 2012, which translates literally as “big box man”, stands at five meters tall, with a large box for a torso clad in a formal pink and grey suit jacket, the very first in this series of works. Wurm’s 3.2-meter-high bronze BALZAC, 2023 will be unveiled for the first time in Yorkshire, made of layers of robes reminiscent of ancient classical statuary and simultaneously a nod to the iconic Rodin tribute to the French writer.

In the Underground Gallery of YSP, over fifty sculptures are installed alongside sixty works on paper, including one of the earliest of the artist’s longstanding drawings, from 1991. While in Gallery One, Wurm’s CONCRETE series are displayed, which respectively appropriate what appear to be fragments of demolished structures, including iron wire, wood, and stone, and merges them with cast-concrete forms of houses and cars. These site alongside the ATTACKS series: bronze and aluminum buildings and cars that have been squashed by oversized sausages and bananas to comical yet disconcerting effect.

Wurm first came to prominence in the 1990s with his ONE MINUTE SCULPTURES – an ongoing series of works where the artist gives written or drawn instructions for participants to pose with ordinary objects for the titular one minute. He documents these fleeting interactions, where viewers effectively become the artwork, a participatory mode of making carried into the prodigious SHIP OF FOOLS, 2017: an adapted caravan with which visitors can interact by putting their heads, hands, bottoms, or feet through apertures, encouraging disruption and disorder in the normally hallowed museum setting.