B. Wurtz at Lulu / Mexico


B. Wurtz
7/2 – 15/4, 2017

Bajio 231 (corner of Manzanillo).
Colonia Roma, 06760 CDMX
Mexico



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.
B. 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 Donn
é, 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.