B. Wurtz:
Organic Yogurt and the Poetics of a Sock
March 30th -May11th, 2024
Saturday 12-5pm or by appointment
SE Cooper Contemporary presents, Organic Yogurt and the Poetics of a Sock, a solo exhibition by B. Wurtz, opening on March 30th and continuing through May 11th, 2024. An artist reception will be held on March 30th from 1-5pm.
Somewhere inside a database of nearly 19,000 art works lives a series of pieces nicknamed “the aristocrat drawings”. These black and white geometric works on paper that are slightly minimal conjure an aerial view of a stage, choreography or maybe a group of humans around a table, a fire, a boardroom, a city hall, a whatever, telling a story. There is no perceivable delineation of importance between the shapes in the drawings. The works are individually titled after historical figures, ones that may have heroic stature, like Hadrian, Catherine the Great, etc. The drawings, made with page layout techniques from before digital processes (i.e. ink ruling pen, triangle and T-square), are intended to level these larger-than-life individuals and suggest a story or space where everyday people are also monumental in their mundane actions.
This is where a related story begins: that of the intimate and compelling ephemerality of the everyday. The poetic joy in which a lonely sock without a partner or a wayward plastic grocery bag caught in a tree, or shoes flung on a utility wire, capture familiar memories, the poem of discarded containers that served our bodies, brought things into our homes, and really kept us going. The work of B. Wurtz is generously anti-promethean, giving us less spoils to celebrate and less risks at the cost of others to feel guilty about. His oeuvre is a revelatory expression of what it means to be human, born out of a kombucha psychosis that is disassociated from what has been called the poisonous human story of Botulism, and as far as culture goes, it memorializes the little things that made a difference in the past, and a difference today.
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Born 1948 in Pasadena, California, B. Wurtz is best known for his playful and compelling sculptures constructed from discarded materials like produce packaging, construction lumber, and plastic bags. He received a BA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, in 1980. The sculptor and painter currently lives and works in New York, New York.
B. Wurtz's repurposing of everyday flotsam into joyous, humorous, and beautiful objects undermine grand artistic gesture while elevating the commonplace. The artist's transformative amalgams of found materials have tended to coalesce around the subjects of "sleeping, eating, and keeping warm"—the foundational human needs named in his 1973 drawing Three Important Things. While his sculptures are often modest in scale, in 2018, the artist created his now iconic Kitchen Trees for the New York City Public Art Fund, transforming City Hall Park with towering columns of colorful colanders exploding with plastic fruit.
Wurtz has been the subject of over 52 solo exhibitions at prestigious venues including: Feature Inc. (1987, 1991, 1992, 2001, 2003, 2006, New York); Gallery 400 (2000, Chicago); White Flag Projects (2012, St. Louis); Kunstverein (2015, Freiburg, Germany); and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, (2015, Ridgefield, Connecticut). In 2015, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom mounted a retrospective exhibition of the artist's work that traveled to La Casa Encendida, Madrid through 2016. In 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles mounted a major solo exhibition of his work, This Has No Name.
His work has also been included in over 174 group exhibitions including: Pandora's Box: Joseph Cornell Unlocks the MCA Collection (2011, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago); Building Blocks: Contemporary Works from the Collection (2011, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence); and Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s (2018, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC)