Erwin Wurm valuation
Austrian sculptor of the One Minute Sculptures, Fat Cars and the Narrow House, who makes sculpture out of everyday life.
Erwin Wurm was born in Bruck an der Mur, in Styria, in 1954, and lives and works in Vienna and Limberg in Lower Austria.
What a work by Erwin Wurm is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Erwin Wurm was born in Bruck an der Mur, in Styria, in 1954, and lives and works in Vienna and Limberg in Lower Austria. Since the late 1980s he has made the One Minute Sculptures, in which a person follows his instructions and poses with ordinary props, a bucket on the head, pens up the nose, a body balanced on a chair, and becomes the sculpture for as long as the pose lasts; the Red Hot Chili Peppers restaged several of them in their video for Can't Stop in 2003. The rest of his work treats weight, clothing and the things people own as sculptural material: the Fat Cars and the Fat House swell as if overfed, the Narrow House squeezes his parents' home to a sliver, jumpers are pulled over walls and furniture, and handbags and stones stand up on legs. He showed the Narrow House in Venice in 2011 and represented Austria at the Venice Biennale in 2017.
His output is large and comes in many forms: bronzes and painted resin or aluminium sculptures, often in editions, photographs of the One Minute Sculptures, drawings and instructions for them, and prints and multiples. The edition size, the foundry or fabricator and the certificate matter for the sculpture, and painted surfaces chip and need care. A One Minute Sculpture sold as an object, with its props and instructions, should come with the studio's documentation of what the work consists of. Thaddaeus Ropac, Lehmann Maupin and König Galerie have all shown him.
Bruck an der Mur, the One Minute Sculptures and Venice
The Albertina in Vienna showed him in 2018 and the Albertina Modern another exhibition in 2024. The Yorkshire Sculpture Park showed him in 2023.
The first Fat Car began as a project with designers at Opel, whose technology could not then produce the swollen shape he wanted.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
