Collection: B. Wurtz

B. Wurtz (b. 1948, USA) has developed a practice over more than five decades around the overlooked materials of daily life: bags, shoelaces, food containers, socks, buttons, paper, wire, and domestic fragments. Rather than monumentalizing these things, Wurtz alters their status through arrangement, attention, and placement — making the minor object available as a site of sustained attention without resolving it into either craft or spectacle.

His work was shown at Feature, New York, under Hudson’s direction, and has been included in major survey exhibitions of American art. It is held in public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago. Wurtz’s practice has been consistently difficult to classify — moving between sculpture, assemblage, drawing, and daily life — and has attracted renewed critical attention in recent years.

Items in this section include exhibition catalogues and printed matter in which Wurtz’s work passes from object into image, from exhibition into archive, and from daily life into art-historical category.