It stands in stark contrast to the château he now inhabits with his family. Here Wurm has created a retreat for himself, surrounded by his own art and by his private collection: Joseph Beuys, undoubtedly the strongest influence early on in his career; Alighiero Boetti; Lucio Fontana; Elaine Sturtevant alongside a Dürer and a Picasso; works by fellow Austrian colleagues Brigitte Kowanz, Herbert Brandl, Martin Walde, Markus Schinwald, Josef Kern and Franz West displayed next to tribal art forming an eclectic mixture, a far cry from his middle class background and its symbols of narrow-mindedness.
Erwin Wurm: The Narrow House was my parents’ house, I helped my father build it. My father was a policeman, he didn’t have much money. It’s a typical Austrian house of the seventies, it has this pre-fabricated, industrialised form, a really awful architectural language. But that’s the architecture of our time and these houses are more and more destroying our landscape, our psychological and philosophical landscape.