Interview with Erwin Wurm

Erwin Wurm is considered Austria’s most important contemporary artist. His works have been exhibited in the world’s most renowned museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Tate Modern in London. He has now created a new series of sculptures: Bad People, developed in collaboration with the Academy of Ceramics Gmunden (AoCG), is currently on display at the Gmundner Keramik Manufaktur. The exhibition is the latest project of the AoCG, a platform for artists launched in 2022 by Gmundner together with OÖ Landes-Kultur GmbH. The initiative focuses on fostering exchange between Europe’s oldest ceramics manufacturer and internationally acclaimed artists — most recently, for example, with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

In this interview, Erwin Wurm talks about faces and heads, clay as a design medium, and why it sometimes helps to view the world through the lens of the absurd.

Mr. Wurm, in your new ceramic sculptures you present paradoxical representations of people — distorted noses, ears, mouths, and faces. What was the idea behind this, and why are we dealing with “bad people”?

At the centre of these new works are, above all, ideas of people — or more precisely, of heads. I experiment with the prototype of the head: a mostly round, voluminous form, punctuated by openings. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth — these characteristic elements serve as the starting point. Often complemented by a neck, they are recontextualised, distorted, and deformed by me. This sometimes results in physiognomic echoes, but sometimes in abstract shapes that resist clear categorisation. It’s a play on perception and expectation: What exactly defines a head? What appears familiar to us, what seems strange — and what might even come across as grotesque? I’m not aiming to create concrete portraits or specific depictions of individuals. And yet, the work addresses something deeply human. Are the results really “bad people”? I’m not entirely sure myself. The title served more as a loose, associative framework. The actual creative process, on the other hand, was open, playful, and constantly evolving.

You’ve used ceramics as a means of artistic expression. What defines clay as a creative medium for you?

When you work with clay, something quite remarkable happens: you return to the origins of sculpture. The act of placing both hands into the clay truly fascinated me — feeling it softly stick between your fingers, shaping it to build volume, adding and subtracting as you go. In this way, you explore the fundamental principles of sculpture — in a constant interplay between intellect and manual labor. Sometimes the head guides the hands; other times, the hands lead and the head simply tries to keep up. It was a deeply engaging process that’s hard to put into words — and one that pulled me away from the usual methods of my artistic practice. Normally, my work involves realizing specific ideas and concepts in materials — along with all the challenges that come with that. Working with clay, by contrast, brought something else to the forefront: immediacy, directness, and a sense of experimentation, driven purely by the material itself. Suddenly, you find yourself back at the beginning — like a child in a sandbox, shaping figures, fantasies, and forms from wet sand. That’s essentially what I did here: I went back to the beginning — and played.

Were there any particular role models or influences that were important to you when working with ceramics and clay?

I actually wanted to take a rather unorthodox — perhaps even naive — approach to it. In other words, I wanted to shape something out of clay that you wouldn’t typically associate with the medium. Of course, there’s always the possibility that, unconsciously, you place yourself within an artistic lineage. I’m not entirely sure — and that’s the beauty of it. Still, there was one thing that probably did influence me in this work…

What exactly are you thinking of?

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at early artefacts — the ways in which our ancestors expressed themselves. The tools they used have something incredibly urgent and primal about them — hand axes or bone needles, for example. You immediately sense: this is where it all begins, where human creativity first takes shape. That’s what fascinated me so much while working on Bad People: this return to clay — something archaic, elemental, almost childlike.

What role did the craftsmanship aspect play in this process? You realised your project at the Gmundner Keramik Manufaktur.

Let’s put it this way: when it came to craftsmanship, it was only important to me personally that what I created could withstand the high temperatures of the firing process—without any details breaking or being lost. For this to work smoothly, you need experience, care, and support. In my case, that came from the great people on site at Gmundner Keramik, who guided and supported me with their expertise. Working with clay is a time-consuming process. After I developed my sculptures, everything had to be dried first. Only then could the next step begin: glazing. This involves applying a diluted colour powder that melts during firing and coats the entire object like a film. Only when this process is complete do the objects take on their actual, final colour. The colour tone looks completely different when it is first applied, which was often confusing while painting. In a way, I had to think like a photo negative. This always brought a moment of uncertainty: would everything turn out the way I had imagined?

‘Bad People’ picks up on a characteristic element of your art: you deform elements of our everyday lives—houses, for example, or cars—and thus offer a new perspective on them. Many people find that funny. Do you?

There’s a certain misunderstanding here: I don’t work with humour. I’m not a joke teller or a comedian. What interests me is the paradoxical and the absurd. For instance, adding or reducing volume can alter content and shift levels of meaning. In this way, sculpture becomes a means of asking questions about the present—and especially about what immediately surrounds us, whether it’s houses, cars, gherkins, or heads and faces. Something familiar, when encountered in a distorted form, might seem funny at first. But what interests me is the moment that follows: the sense of disorientation that can lead us to question what we take for granted as part of our reality. I believe that when you look at the world through the lens of the absurd, you often see it more clearly.