ERWIN WURM - Dreamers. The exhibition at the Fortuny Museum

Fortuny Museum presents a major monographic exhibition dedicated to Erwin Wurm (Bruck an der Mur, Austria, 1954), one of the most influential contemporary artists. Over the course of his career, Wurm has profoundly rethought the very concept of sculpture: expanding notions of time, mass, and surface, abstraction and representation, while placing the body and the everyday object at the center of a reflection that transcends traditional boundaries between art and life.

Erwin Wurm, Dreamer, One Arm, 2024, aluminium, paint, 92 x 148 x 93 cm. © Erwin Wurm, Bildrecht, Wien 2026. photo: Markus Gradwohl

Humor, a fundamental tool in his practice, opens onto philosophical and social questions: Wurm stages the tensions of contemporary society, criticizing the pressures of capitalism and externally imposed constructions of identity. The liminal space between “high” and “low,” between the monumental and the banal, becomes the privileged territory of a farcical and paradoxical reality. As Erwin Wurm states, “The ordinary is so close and so familiar to us that we are inclined to overlook it. Looking at the ordinary from the perspective of the absurd and the paradox gives us the opportunity to see something different, perhaps more interesting.”

Welcoming his work into the rooms of Museo Fortuny means accepting a double challenge to gravity: the physical one, which governs volumes and masses, and the historical one, exercised by the cultural stratification of one of the city’s most memory-laden places.

After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts and the School of Applied Arts in Vienna between the late 1970s and early 1980s, Wurm gained international recognition with the celebrated One Minute Sculptures (1996–97), presented on the second floor of the museum, where visitors can directly interact with them. In these works, the artist provides instructions inviting the public to perform actions or poses with everyday objects—furniture, chairs, bottles, books, sweaters—transforming the human body into a temporary sculpture. The work is by nature ephemeral: it exists in the gesture, in the duration of one minute, and survives through photographic documentation, often produced using the instant medium of Polaroid, a true “taxidermy of the instant.”

At the same time, Wurm anthropomorphizes common objects in unexpected ways, as in the Dreamers works, in which oversized cushions supported by human limbs—legs, arms, feet—in often awkward or precarious positions become metaphors for the dream world, exploring the tension between the physical body and the psychological dimension of the unconscious.

Within the museum, the dialogue focuses in particular on clothing as a sculptural extension of the body. In the Substitutes series, Wurm presents garments devoid of the human figure, monuments to absence or membranes that retain the final gesture of those who inhabited them. The analogy is with Fortuny’s Delphos, a shell ready to receive the body, yet lacking autonomous structure without it. An emblematic comparison emerges between Fortuny’s Knossos shawl and the sculpture Yikes, simple rectangles of material that acquire meaning only in relation to the person. Knossos is an “open” scenic device, requiring a creative gesture in order to become a living sculpture; Yikes, by contrast, freezes the instant in which that gesture has just dissolved. In both cases, the work exists in the time of action, on the threshold between presence and absence.

Erwin Wurm, Psyche - As You Like It (One Minute Sculptures), 2024 One Minute Sculptures series, aluminium, paint, fabric (pullovers), instruction drawing 262 x 115 x 68. © Erwin Wurm, Bildrecht, Wien 2026. photo: Markus Gradwohl

In these terms, the eccentric dialogue with Mariano Fortuny takes shape: a polymathic genius—stage designer, inventor, painter, and designer—Fortuny transformed Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei into a total laboratory, where light, architecture, and textile merged into a unified work of art. Museo Fortuny today takes the form of a true physical “semiosphere”: an environment in which heterogeneous texts, forms, and memories collide, generating new explosions of meaning.

To enter Palazzo Fortuny during this exhibition, in particular, means immersing oneself in a living architectural organism, a sensitive membrane where objects and container engage in a continuous exchange. Wurm’s work enters this palimpsest as an element of controlled destabilization: his sculptures bend, swell, and contract under the weight of thought and irony, transforming the museum into a laboratory of contemporary identity. Yesterday, as today.

In this encounter between the solidity of the past and the precariousness of the present, a crucial question emerges: in a world in which we are constantly called upon to “give ourselves a form,” what remains of us when the pose dissolves?

The exhibition invites the public to engage with this tension, recognizing in the human being itself the ultimate plastic material.