Erwin Wurm Turns Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin Into a Full-Building Experiment With “Tomorrow: Yes”
A 19th-century schoolhouse appears to have been squeezed by an unseen hand. A sailboat, built for distance, is bent into a loop of perpetual return. These are the two gravitational centers of “Tomorrow: Yes”, a large-scale solo exhibition by Austrian artist Erwin Wurm (b. 1954) that has taken over every corner of Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin through April 11, 2026.
The presentation marks the first time Wurm has occupied the gallery’s entire Pantin site, a former industrial complex whose brick-and-glass architecture shifts from expansive, luminous halls to more intimate rooms. The scenography is deliberately open: works are spaced with conspicuous breathing room, allowing their distortions to register against the building’s clean lines and factory proportions.
“Tomorrow: Yes” also extends a long relationship between Wurm and the gallery, and arrives after a run of major museum presentations across Europe, including at Vienna’s Albertina and institutions in Germany and Spain. In Pantin, the emphasis falls largely on the past 15 years of the artist’s production, with a selection that includes works described as often previously unseen.
Two installations anchor the exhibition’s conceptual and visual rhythm.
The first, “School” (2024), reproduces a 19th-century school building subjected to imaginary pressure. The structure looks compressed, as if the architecture itself has buckled under the weight of expectation. Yet it remains accessible: visitors can walk inside, encountering an emblem of education that has been physically reconfigured into a metaphor for constraint. In Wurm’s hands, the familiar institution becomes a sculptural diagram of how systems meant to shape minds can also narrow them.
Facing it is “Star” (2025), a six-meter-high sailboat bent at its center so that it can only turn in circles. The image is immediately legible and quietly bleak: a vessel designed for forward motion is condemned to repetition. The work reads as a pointed allegory for ideologies, political projects, and personal trajectories that promise progress while remaining trapped in patterns that never quite break.
Around these two poles, Wurm’s broader sculptural vocabulary unfolds in marble, bronze, aluminum, and ceramic. Across his practice, everyday objects and architectural forms are pushed into states of swelling, sagging, shrinking, and twisting. Houses, vehicles, boats, and garments become bodies under pressure, as if social and psychological forces have left fingerprints in the material.
The exhibition includes works connected to Wurm’s well-known “Fat pieces”, in which cars, houses, and other familiar forms are exaggeratedly “fattened” into bulbous volumes. The strategy is not simply comic. By treating sculpture as a matter of adding or subtracting mass, Wurm turns changes in volume into a language for transformation: the body’s vulnerability, society’s distortions, and the way norms can quietly reshape what seems stable.
Recent ceramics extend that inquiry into a more organic register. By isolating and hybridizing fragments of ears, noses, and hands, Wurm moves toward forms that hover between the grotesque and the sensual, where humor and discomfort coexist in the same contour.
Although “Tomorrow: Yes” is dominated by large autonomous installations, it remains informed by the participatory spirit of Wurm’s “One Minute Sculptures”, the instruction-based works he developed in the 1990s. In Pantin, that legacy surfaces as an invitation to consider sculpture not only as an object to look at, but as a set of behaviors and positions that implicate the viewer.
Taken together, the exhibition frames Wurm’s distortions as more than formal play. In the compressed school and the circling sailboat, and in the swollen and warped objects that surround them, “Tomorrow: Yes” proposes a sculptural way of thinking about the dead ends of contemporary systems — and the uneasy laughter that often accompanies recognizing them.
