I Love my Time, I Hate My Time: Recent Work by Erwin Wurm

April 2 - June 12, 2005

With his first major American survey, I Love My Time, I Don’t Like My Time, Erwin Wurm comes to the United States like a rumor taking form. The artist has enjoyed wide recognition in the international art world since the 1980s with projects and one-person exhibitions. Wurm’s celebrity has been recognized in the United States by a limited yet passionate group of enthusiasts, artists, curators and collectors. This exhibition covers more than ten years of production and explores the variety of ways sculpture can be made, understood, and communicated through performance, photography, installation, drawing, video, and text.

Wurm’s work is centered on ideas of sculpture and has less concern for the material by-product of artistic processes. Extending the dialog of pioneering performance and conceptual art of the 1960s into formal works of sculpture, he explores the sculptural possibilities of the everyday. Another trademark of Wurm’s work is how it operates with uncluttered, matter-of-fact efficiency while simultaneously involving a variety of artistic idioms. He deftly choreographs bodies and objects to lift his temporary sculptures above the status of mere incident, form, and behavior. Wurm’s most cited projects are his One Minute Sculptures, which invite audience members to participate in creating the art object by posing their bodies with a variety of props. The results of these interactions, documented in photographs and videos, often prove humorous and poignant, suggesting that while art may aspire to higher ideals, we remain mired in the constraints of the physical world. By introducing the artist or viewer’s body into the making of sculpture, there is a parallel drawn between the mortality of physical beings and the temporality of sculptures that begin and end within the span of a minute.

This exhibition ranges from seminal early videos such as 59 Positions, to a substantial selection of temporary sculpture instructions, photographs, and drawings. Wurm’s most recent and monumental artwork to date, Fat House features a video in its interior titled I Love My Time, I Don’t Like My Time. Both Fat House and I Love My Time, I Don’t Like My Time debut in the United States on the occasion of this touring exhibition.

René de Guzman

Visual Arts Curator

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

This exhibition is organized by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I Love My Time, I Don’t Like My Time is supported in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The Federal Chancellery - Department for the Arts, Austria; the Austrian Consulate General of Los Angeles; and The Betlach Family Foundation.

Exhibition Sponsor: The Otto M. Budig Family Foundation

2004-2005 Exhibition Season Sponsor: Cinergy Foundation