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Erwin Wurm Transforms the Fortuny Museum into a Theater of the Absurd

In Venice, the artist's floating garments, dreamlike figures and playful distortions transform sculpture into a perception-bending study of cultural conventions.

During the Venice Biennale, Austrian artist Erwin Wurm unveiled his latest show, set in the richly eclectic framework of the Fortuny Museum, a Gothic-inspired palazzo transformed by the Spanish-born artist, designer, inventor, stage designer, photographer and textile innovator Mariano Fortuny into a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art.

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As one of the city’s most atmospheric and revealing museums, Museo Fortuny offers what could be described as a quintessentially Venetian experience, condensing so many layers of the city into a single place: decadence, craftsmanship, theater, textile culture, cosmopolitanism, collecting and artistic reinvention. Interacting with this layered context, Wurm staged one of the most successful site-specific interventions among all the Biennale’s collateral events, running concurrently with his latest show at Lehmann Maupin in New York, “Double Dream,” on view through June 6.

After the frenzy of the openings, Observer joined Wurm to contemplate the absurdist, playful characters installed around the rooms of Fortuny’s palace and to discuss the central themes of his sculptures: the social body in relation to its surroundings.

Wurm admits to having been immediately drawn to the “madness” of the space itself, its loud mix of tapestries, copies, historical references and decorative elements: “It’s very eclectic. There are great tapestries, great views, but also copies and copies of copies. The way everything comes together creates a strange atmosphere. With my work, I didn’t have to think too much because I immediately felt what would fit here.” His own sculptures, in fact, are ‘substitutes,’ as he describes them. “The people are missing; only the dresses remain. They become dancers, prayers, or whatever you want them to be.”

The new works on display participate in a choreography in the space, dancing and floating as they playfully take over the scene. Fortuny also designed theater stages, and one can feel that theatricality in the architecture, Wurm notes. Yet the space is heavy and dark, so he wanted to create the opposite—something lighter. “That’s why the works expand outward through color and form. These very thin creatures could even resemble birds. It was really about counterbalancing the heaviness and darkness of the architecture.”

Over the years, Wurm has been........

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