This Has No Name is the first major U.S. museum survey of New York-based sculptor B. Wurtz (b. 1948). For over forty years, Wurtz has transformed the minutiae of daily life into poetic sculptures, drawings, and assemblages. Items such as food tins, clothing, plastic bags, mesh produce bags, and yogurt containers are transformed into elegant meditations on form and line while simultaneously underscoring the artist’s commitment to the ethics of reuse.
B. Wurtz was born in 1948 in Pasadena, California, and lives and works in New York. He received a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1980. In 2015 he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom, which traveled to La Casa Encendida, Madrid. He has had additional solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Freiburg; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; and Lulu, Mexico City. His work has been included in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, among others. He is presently working on a major public art commission for Public Art Fund, New York. He is represented by Metro Pictures, New York; Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles; Office Baroque, Brussels; and Maisterravalbuena, Madrid.
Virtual ICA LA: B. Wurtz
360° exhibition documentation of B. Wurtz: This Has No Name
Installation view of B. Wurtz: This Has No Name
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. September 30, 2018–February 3, 2019
Photo: Brian Forrest/ICA LA