About the work

My sculpture, Collection #14, from 2001, is part of a series I made using found un-mounted 35 mm slides. At that time one of my freelance jobs was to prepare audio/visual presentation slides for a fabric company. Every new job required mounting slides in reusable glass and plastic slide mounts. The fabric company would send a photographer to all the current fashion shows to take shots of the runway models. (This was the time of the major supermodels, so I was constantly seeing people like Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista in the photos.) The clothes in the images were made using whatever type of fabric the company was currently focused on.

When I worked on a new job I removed the images from the previous show and threw them away. I would then clean and use the same slide mounts for the next presentation. But after a while I started saving the old slide images and would take them home. I amassed a large amount. Since my art is often related to the subjects of food, clothing and shelter, these found slides were appropriate. I'd always liked those circular plastic hanging racks for drying socks. So I got the idea to string together the un-mounted slides with thread and hang them from the clips, thus making a chandelier-like object.

-B. Wurtz, New York, 2022

About the artist

B. WURTZ (b. 1948 Pasadena, California) lives and works in New York. Over the past four decades, Wurtz has been making intimate sculptural works from familiar, utilitarian objects; papier-mâché assemblages balance atop readymade polystyrene plinths, sculptures made using straws, plastic cups and bottle tops delicately attached by pieces of string, aluminium pan paintings and socks sewn to raw canvas exemplify the breadth of his repertoire. He embraces, subverts and reinvents objects which are so familiar that they are almost invisible in our day to day lives.

In September 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, opened B. Wurtz’s first major U.S. museum survey, This Has No Name. In 2015, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, presented Selected Works 1970-2015, a retrospective of Wurtz’s work which travelled to La Casa Encendida, Madrid in 2016. He has had solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany (2015); White Flag Projects, St. Louis, USA (2012); and Gallery 400, the University of Illinois, Chicago, USA (2000). His work has been included in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York, USA (2004); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France.