Erwin Wurm: Chamber Play with Jackson Pollock and Samuel Beckett

The Austrian Cultural Forum New York – housed in a landmark building designed by the Austrian architect Raimund Abraham, whose work explored architecture as a spatial, social, and intellectual proposition – is pleased to present Erwin Wurm: Chamber Play with Jackson Pollock and Samuel Beckett, an exhibition that brings together three artists whose practices, though radically different, are rooted in deeply personal reflections on the human condition. As suggested by its title, Chamber Play evokes the intensity of a multi-faceted theatrical encounter, in which action, the testing of limits, the absurd, and existential complexities emerge as common threads.

At the center of the exhibition is the work of Austrian artist Erwin Wurm (b. 1954). For almost five decades, he has challenged conventional definitions of sculpture while exploring the absurdity of everyday life and the fragile relationship between individuals and their surroundings. Through paradox, contradiction, and physical action, Wurm transforms familiar objects, gestures, and situations into moments of reflection and disruption. For example, his One Minute Sculptures invite individuals to follow simple instructions and create temporary, precarious compositions with their own bodies and everyday objects. In another body of work, his Performative Sculptures, recognizable forms derived from everyday objects or architectural elements are altered by the artist through performances carried out in the intimacy of his studio. Even upon completion, they preserve the physical traces of their making, revealing the instability of familiar forms and situations.

Indeed, the affinities between Erwin Wurm, Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), and Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) arise from their shared engagement with the limitations of their respective mediums. For example, Pollock rejected the traditional easel and made the physical act of painting central to his work. By placing his canvases directly on the floor, allowing him to move around and within the composition, and using his entire body in rhythmic, gestural movements, he transformed his paintings into actual records of action, chance, and bodily energy. Beckett, meanwhile, disrupted the conventions of language and theater through silence, repetition, and fragmented actions, exposing the tensions between isolation, communication, and meaning. The characters in his plays often appear trapped within cycles of waiting and repetition. Wurm similarly expanded sculpture beyond the fixed object, using transformation, physical action and the repetition of gestures to question perception, identity, and the conditions of everyday life.

In addition to bringing together sculptures, films, photographs, and works on paper from across Wurm’s oeuvre, the exhibition features several works by Pollock, including a rare sculpture Stone Head, as well as works on paper, Hans Namuth’s 1951 film documenting him at work in his studio, and previously unseen archival material, including personal letters and family photographs. These are presented alongside screenings of Beckett’s groundbreaking television works produced for Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR, Stuttgart): Eh Joe (1966), his first television play, and Quad (Quadrat I + II) (1981), a wordless work exploring repetition, movement, and constraint through precisely choreographed actions.

Overall, Erwin Wurm: Chamber Play with Jackson Pollock and Samuel Beckett examines art as a space for confronting the complexities of human existence. At a moment when social cohesion is increasingly fragile and artificial intelligence challenges traditional notions of human creativity and presence, the exhibition asks enduring questions: What does it mean to be human, and how might our understanding of the human condition expand through art?

Erwin Wurm (born 1954, in Bruck an der Mur, Austria) is an internationally acclaimed Austrian artist whose work has been exhibited extensively in galleries, museums, and public art spaces around the world. His solo exhibitions have been presented at institutions including the Public Art Fund in New York, the Ludwig Museum, the Sara Hildén Art Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, GEM – Museum for Contemporary Art, the Lehmbruck Museum, the Musée des Beaux-Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, the Berlinische Galerie, the Albertina Museum Vienna, and Albertina Modern. Wurm is represented by König Galerie, Thaddaeus Ropac, and Lehmann Maupin. Among numerous honors, he has received the Grand Austrian State Prize and the 59th GNMH Award. His works are held in major public and private collections worldwide, including those of the Walker Art Center, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum Ludwig, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, the Museum of Old and New Art, and the Centre Pompidou. He is represented by Thaddaeus Ropac, König Gallery, and Lehmann Maupin.

Paul Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) was an American painter and a major figure of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Widely known for his revolutionary technique, Pollock poured, dripped, and splashed liquid household paint onto canvases laid horizontally on the floor, allowing him to work from all sides and engage the entire surface of the painting. Often described as both “all-over painting” and “action painting,” his intensely physical and spontaneous process involved the movement of his whole body, at times resembling a frenetic dance. His radical approach to abstraction divided critics, with some praising the immediacy and energy of his process while others dismissed its seemingly random effects. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, whose artistic insight and support played an important role in his career and whose advocacy helped shape his legacy after his death. Pollock died in 1956 at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related car accident. His work was the subject of a memorial retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York four months after his death, followed by a larger retrospective there in 1967. Major retrospectives at MoMA and Tate Gallery in London in 1998 and 1999 further affirmed his enduring significance. Concurrent with this exhibition, from October 4, 2026, through January 31, 2027, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will present Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous, the first major New York exhibition devoted to either artist in more than two decades and the first to examine the full arc of their careers together.

Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906–1989) was an Irish playwright, novelist, and poet whose works, written in both English and French, are characterized by their bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic portrayals of human existence, dark humor, and literary experimentation. Widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Beckett transformed modern theatre and is best known for his seminal play Waiting for Godot (1953). In recognition of his foundational contribution to literature and theatre, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. From 1966 to 1986, Beckett created a series of television plays for Süddeutscher Rundfunk, including Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, …but the clouds…, Quad I and II, Nacht und Träume, and What Where. Developed in close collaboration with the broadcaster, these works explored the possibilities of television as an artistic medium, engaging with new technologies of production while extending the formal innovations that had defined Beckett’s earlier theatre and prose. At the same time, the television plays marked a significant departure from his previous work, reflecting the new creative possibilities and constraints arising from the specific conditions of television production.