One Minute Sculpture
- Artist: Erwin Wurm
- Date: 1997
- Medium: Photograph, c-print on paper
- Dimensions: support: 450 x 300 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is the "One Minute Sculpture" by Erwin Wurm. A color photograph from 1997 that captures a single instant in the long‑running One Minute Sculptures series. Wurm, a Swiss artist born in 1954, gives a person a set of written or pictorial instructions and then asks them to hold a pose with an everyday object for exactly sixty seconds. The result—a body contorted beside a bucket, a bicycle, or a fruit—becomes the photograph that we see. The series spans photographs, video, and live performance, blurring the line between sculpture and image. Wurm’s work invites us to laugh at the absurdity of the moment while also asking how we interact with objects and with our own bodies. In this image the ordinary becomes theatrical, and the ordinary becomes a platform for play and reflection.
See it in person
One Minute Sculpture is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
