See Erwin Wurm's absurd sculptures take over a British park, from a Birkin bag on legs to a folding truck climbing the wall

The absurd takes center stage in a new retrospective of sculptural works by mischievous Austrian artist Erwin Wurm at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in northern England. Over the decades, Wurm has become known for works that interrupt our everyday perception of the world, distort or anthropomorphize familiar objects, and mock rigid societal norms.

“trap of truthtakes its name from the philosophical questions of René Descartes, emphasizing the inevitable subjectivity of our interactions with the world. Highlights include Wurm’s famous “One Minute Sculptures”, such as Silly (2010) and ship of fools (2017), performative works in which a human fails to use an everyday object correctly and finds himself trapped in a ridiculous position.

Several new, never-before-seen sculptures include Big step (2022), which ridicules society’s obsession with conspicuous consumption by bulking up a Hermès Birkin bag and allowing it to live its own life on long, slender legs.

Visitors to the exhibition will notice that there is hardly a subject or medium that Wurm avoided. “At some point, I realized that everything around me can be a work of art, absolutely everything,” Wurm said in a press release. “At the beginning, because I didn’t have any money and I worked relatively quickly, I used sticks and cans. Then I used old clothes, which cost nothing, before finally realizing that I could actually use anything around me. It was the decisive stage, because then everything was possible.

The mega survey includes more than 100 works, pairing 55 indoor and 19 outdoor sculptures with paintings, drawings and photographs that give wider context to Wurm’s ideas.

Discover some of the works in the exhibition, on view until April 28, 2024, below.