B. Wurtz
The First Twenty Years
28 Apr - 23 Jun 2018
B. Wurtz, The First Twenty Years, exhibition view, Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin, 2018. Photo: Marcus Schneider
B. WURTZ
The First Twenty Years
28 April - 23 June 2018
Galerija Gregor Podnar is pleased to announce its second solo exhibition of B. Wurtz. Presenting a selection of Wurtz’s works from the first two decades of his artistic practice, the exhibition aims to highlight the formation of Wurtz’s idiosyncratic formal vocabulary during the 1970s and 1980s.
From the 1970s onwards, Wurtz has been using commonplace materials that relate to the basic categories of life, such as food, clothing, and shelter, to create sculptures that probe and explore the notions of monumentality and the quotidian. Combining and amending these materials, Wurtz began to cast the familiar in a new light while preserving the integrity of the used objects: ‘I thought if I used really, really ordinary, overlooked stuff that tends to be ignored, it gave me more of an opportunity to add something to it. . . . It makes it something else but it doesn’t obliterate what it is. That is what I was striving for, honoring the things for how they serve us but making them look a bit classical and elegant so people can see them in a different light.’[1]
It has been with great attention to the range of the chosen materials and a nuanced sensibility for composition, that Wurtz has been since the early works transforming fragments of the ordinary into sculptures of wit and poetic composure.
B. Wurtz was born in 1948 in Pasadena, California, and lives and works in New York. His recent exhibitions include retrospective exhibitions at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2015), and at La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2016), as well as group exhibitions Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2018), and A Page from My Intimate Journal (Part I) at Gordon Robichaux, New York (2018). In 2012 Wurtz was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant.
[1] S. Dunne, ‘Pan-Tastic Paintings: The Art Of B. Wurtz At The Aldrich’, Hartford Courant, June 2015.
The First Twenty Years
28 April - 23 June 2018
Galerija Gregor Podnar is pleased to announce its second solo exhibition of B. Wurtz. Presenting a selection of Wurtz’s works from the first two decades of his artistic practice, the exhibition aims to highlight the formation of Wurtz’s idiosyncratic formal vocabulary during the 1970s and 1980s.
From the 1970s onwards, Wurtz has been using commonplace materials that relate to the basic categories of life, such as food, clothing, and shelter, to create sculptures that probe and explore the notions of monumentality and the quotidian. Combining and amending these materials, Wurtz began to cast the familiar in a new light while preserving the integrity of the used objects: ‘I thought if I used really, really ordinary, overlooked stuff that tends to be ignored, it gave me more of an opportunity to add something to it. . . . It makes it something else but it doesn’t obliterate what it is. That is what I was striving for, honoring the things for how they serve us but making them look a bit classical and elegant so people can see them in a different light.’[1]
It has been with great attention to the range of the chosen materials and a nuanced sensibility for composition, that Wurtz has been since the early works transforming fragments of the ordinary into sculptures of wit and poetic composure.
B. Wurtz was born in 1948 in Pasadena, California, and lives and works in New York. His recent exhibitions include retrospective exhibitions at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2015), and at La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2016), as well as group exhibitions Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2018), and A Page from My Intimate Journal (Part I) at Gordon Robichaux, New York (2018). In 2012 Wurtz was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant.
[1] S. Dunne, ‘Pan-Tastic Paintings: The Art Of B. Wurtz At The Aldrich’, Hartford Courant, June 2015.