Erwin Wurm, one of Austria's most important and internationally famous sculptors, has been preoccupied with expanding the concept of sculpture since the 1980s. In his "One Minute Sculptures", for example - temporary, grotesquely comic works - he invites the spectator to become a sculpture, even providing various kinds of accessories for the purpose. What remain are photographs or videos showing a single moment in the short life of these sculptures. Erwin Wurm's utilization of the media of photography and video is highly distinctive and enables him to include not only the classical parameters of sculpture - gravity, weight, static equilibrium, stability, materiality, form - but additionally the parameter of time. Human bodies in combination with objects and positions they can only hold for a few moments are an ideal means of extending sculpture into the realm of the media. This volume, "Fat Survival", illustrated mainly in colour, provides a condensed survey of Erwin Wurm's work since the early 1990s.

Erwin Wurm at the CNP, Paris

The Centre national de la photographie in Paris shows works by the Austrian artist from May 29 until August 28, 2002.
During the last seven years, Erwin Wurm has created a complex series of videos, photographs, and performance works in which a variety of simple, yet bizarre, actions are depicted. Collectively titled "One Minute Sculptures", the works show the artist or other performers - often volunteers solicited through newspaper ads - carrying out peculiar feats in unusual settings. In one, for example, a person dives head first into a crate with their legs flailing jack-in-the-box style; in another, someone does push-ups on four teacups; while in yet another, a regular-looking man in a suit stands with two strands of asparagus stuck up his nose. Although staged with a conspicuous absence of special effects, these scenes nonetheless propose an "otherness" of meaning or intention that, while difficult to pigeonhole, captures both the eye and the imagination with great potency.
from: Maia Damianovic 'From Moment to Moment', in: "Erwin Wurm"