Artist: B. Wurtz
Venue: Lulu, Mexico City
Date: February 7 – April 15, 2017
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Lulu, Mexico City
Lulu is proud to present a solo exhibition of the highly influential American, New York-based sculptor B. Wurtz.
For the past four decades, Wurtz has been creating sculptures that use every day materials to explore and deflate issues of the heroic, monumentality and the sublime. His is a sculpture that humbly yet firmly seeks to dismantle the conventions of its plastic discipline. Although his work might initially seem improvised from the random flotsam and jetsam of daily life, the materials that form his carefully wrought sculptures all but invariably issue from the three basic necessities of life: food, clothing and shelter. As such, it is truly a sculpture of the everyday. Created with great attention to palette, Wurtz brings an almost pop painterly regard to the composition of his objects. He is no less attentive to the supposed fragility of his material, which he treats with a disarming fastidiousness. Occasionally evocative of mandalas, altars or reliquaries, his production is liable to possess a playfully pseudo-religious quality. But nothing is ever straightforward in B. Wurtz’ art. For while he might confer a certain dignity upon the refuse of our most essential needs, it is never that simple. Any ennobling that takes place in what Wurtz does is not without a palpable, if elegant touch of the absurd.
For his exhibition at Lulu, the artist will present a very focused selection of sock pieces as well as a plastic bag tree sculpture, which variously engage and collapse the phallocentricity of verticality as well as received notions of use value, beauty, and the elegiac, among other things.
Wurtz (b. Pasadena, California, 1948) lives and works in New York. A selection of recent solo exhibitions includes: (2016) La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain; Metro Pictures at 83 Pitt Street, New York; Office Baroque, Belgium; (2015) Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom; FOUR A.M., New York; Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Dieu Donné, New York; World Food Books, Melbourne. A selection of recent group exhibitions includes (2016) Redeux (Sort of), Kai Matsumiya Gallery, New York; Exquisite Corpse, Planthouse, New York; Pure Pulp, Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York; Fredericks and Freider Gallery, New York.
He is represented by Richard Telles, Los Angeles; Metro Pictures, New York; Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin; Kate MacGarry, London; Office Baroque, Brussels; and Maisterravalbuena, Madrid.
