Famous for having long challenged the boundaries of sculpture, Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, born in 1954, keeps transforming this traditional medium into something more fluid, participatory, and playfully subversive. The title of his exhibition at the Ludwig Museum  suggests that Wurm embraces life – its energy, temporality, movement, ironic and tragic aspects, as well as its fragility and gentleness – as central components of his art. In this sense Life Beat Soft Melt can be read as a manifesto, encapsulating the full range of sculptural concepts that Wurm investigates.

Since his earliest works, Erwin Wurm has been an artist who questions the boundaries of the medium of sculpture, extending it beyond its three-dimensional form and exploring other dimensions: time, space, surface, the living... His entire practice can thus be seen as a playful, skillful, and ironic challenge to the traditional conventions of the medium.

This exhibition at the Ludwig Museum features the famous One Minute Sculptures, which brought Wurm international recognition in the 1990s. For one minute, the artist invites visitors not merely to observe the sculptures but to actively participate in the works. All visitors are encouraged to try, engage with, and activate the sculptures by following the drawing instructions – often through actions that are simple, seemingly unimpressive, yet precarious and absurd. By interrupting people’s relentless daily routines, Wurm invites them to embrace a moment of pause – unproductive, unprofitable, and non-functional – allowing them to reflect on themselves and to see the world and society from a new perspective.

For the first time, Life Beat Soft Melt presents a new dimension of Wurm’s practice, extending his sculptural language beyond the object and into space through painting, drawing, and watercolour. Fully “melting,” his sculptures transform into paintings, enveloping entire rooms with murals he calls Flat Sculptures. For Wurm, absurdity, strangeness, and distortion are not merely aesthetic devices – they are philosophical tools, means to expose the cult of efficiency, performance, and beauty that governs modern life. His work is a hymn to life, where “beat,” “soft,” and “melt” come together to suggest a more fluid, open, and human world.