… The basic assertion is that Wurm uses the theme of the social shell (clothing, food, furniture, cars, houses) primarily to illustrate the fragility of individual and collective identity formation behind it. The layers he puts around the body, both metaphorically and in reality, the extensive fattening or thinning of things and people are, like the softening of architecture he practices, sculptural metaphors for the existential uncertainty about the boundaries of the self, about the question of the relationship between outside and inside, and about the dominance of the world of things over subjects who seem increasingly deprived of their free will. Only in the deviation from the norm, in a kind of anarchic deviance, the ego succeeds in the momentary leap into (its)ownness. This, however, is linked to the fact that the individual, on the one hand, leaves the social context in which he or she was previously suspended and, on the other hand, voluntarily submits to the instructions of the artist.

the instructions of the artist. …

Stephan Berg