The Art Bystander

In this episode of The Art Bystander Podcast, Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar is joined by Erwin Wurm on the occasion of Mind Bubbles & More at Carling Dalenson in Stockholm, running from 22 September to 31 October 2026. One could easily say Erwin Wurm is one of the world's most recognized and respected artists today.Born in Bruck an der Mur, Austria, in 1954, Wurm has spent more than four decades expanding what sculpture can be, finding material in clothing, furniture, cars, houses and the human body. He originally wanted to become a painter, but found himself placed in a sculpture department. His response was to keep testing the discipline until he could make it his own, eventually returning to painting through works he calls Flat Sculptures.That resistance to a fixed definition runs through his practice. In the 1992 video 59 Positions, a man and his sweater move through a sequence of poses, making sculpture out of the changing relationship between a body and its clothes. His later One Minute Sculptures invite participants to follow instructions involving everyday objects, adopting positions that can be awkward, funny or difficult to maintain. A sculpture exists briefly through someone's willingness to take part, with balance, embarrassment and the presence of an audience becoming part of the work.Wurm's distorted objects extend these questions into the things we buy and inhabit. In his Fat Car series, luxury vehicles acquire swollen bodies, exaggerating the excess already associated with them. Fat House turns domestic security into something ungainly and overgrown, while Narrow House compresses his childhood home into proportions that make moving through it uncomfortable. Possessions become a way of examining the expectations attached to success, respectability and belonging.These works can also be understood against the background of Wurm's childhood in postwar Austria, where the recent Nazi past often remained unspoken and conformity shaped everyday life. The absurd gives him a way of approaching the habits people accept without much examination. Following an instruction, dressing correctly or choosing a particular car becomes material for thinking about how we learn to fit in.There is a useful connection here with Pierre Bourdieu's account of taste and social distinction: the objects around us communicate class and aspiration, whether or not we intend them to. Wurm makes those objects physically strange enough for their social meanings to become harder to overlook. His humour can leave us wondering why we laughed, and how much of our own behaviour we recognise.Mind Bubbles & More brings together three-dimensional sculptures and recent Flat Sculptures. The Mind Bubbles borrow the familiar thought-bubble form from comic books while withholding the words or images we expect to find inside. The viewer supplies an imagined thought, continuing Wurm's interest in participation through an encounter that takes place in the mind.Across sculpture, performance, photography, video and painting, Wurm returns to questions of volume, identity and perception. Wurm’s work is held in major public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Centre Pompidou, and Walker Art Center. He has received Austria’s Grand State Prize for Fine Arts (2013), the GNMH Award (2021), and an honorary doctorate from the University of Belgrade (2022). He is represented by Thaddaeus Ropac, Lehmann Maupin, and König Galerie.An introduction to an artist whose work makes the everyday a subject of sustained scrutiny, from the clothes on our bodies to the instructions we follow and the homes we build around ourselves. And be ready for some laughter! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“If I was going to open a gallery, it needed to have a very personal identity.” I met Cy Schnabel at Villa Magdalena in Madrid during Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend to record a conversation for The Art Bystander podcast.Born in New York in 1993 to Julian Schnabel and Basque designer Olatz López Garmendia, Cy grew up around artists, filmmakers and musicians, with access to his father’s studio from childhood. He studied political science at Bard, imagining a future in journalism, before moving to Mexico City and discovering exhibition-making through the Centro Cultural de España en México.“I just discovered that curating was a storytelling medium.”Villa Magdalena opened in 2020 in Julian’s former studio at the family home on Monte Igueldo in San Sebastián. The setting was personal: summers spent surfing with his twin brother, his mother’s Basque heritage, and his work on the archive of his uncle, Alejandro Garmendia, whose estate remains central to the gallery.Madrid followed in June 2025. Opposite San Nicolás, away from the city’s established gallery concentrations, Cy found a space whose history appealed to him, with timber beams concealed beneath plaster. The move gave his artists greater visibility and a permanent base in a city he sees as an essential connection between Europe and Latin America.His programme returns to narrative painting, symbolic figuration and the ways mythology and folklore survive in images. He writes the texts and curates the exhibitions himself, working with emerging artists alongside older practices that deserve renewed attention.There is a practical responsibility behind that commitment. Artists need sales, and developing an audience for a body of work can take several exhibitions. “I’m running a business,” he says.We spoke about the privileges and assumptions attached to the Schnabel name, his admiration for his father’s painting, and the years of attention an artist’s work requires. His response to questions of inheritance is an invitation to look at what he has made: “People can judge me based on my work.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Berlin’s cultural power was built on cheap space, unfinished buildings and artists willing to live precariously. The city is wealthier now, but can the people who created its value still afford to remain?For this episode of The Art Bystander Podcast, Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar speaks with Philipp Solf, entrepreneur, collector and one of the people behind Wilhelm Hallen and HALLEN 07, and Dr Anne Vieth, Head of the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection.Why does Solf resist calling HALLEN an art fair? What happens when contemporary art turns an industrial building into a desirable address? And what does a company such as Mercedes-Benz owe the culture from which it draws prestige?Vieth takes us inside SEEING FORMS, the collection’s exhibition at HALLEN 07, and speaks about using art to unsettle habits within a corporation. Solf is equally candid about art’s power to position property within a city, bringing the conversation to gentrification, public funding and who gains when culture makes an address valuable. This is a conversation about how Berlin might become wealthier without driving out the artists who made it culturally necessary. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of The Art Bystander, Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar enters a conversation with Michèle Lamy and Scarlett Rouge.Michèle Lamy is often introduced in relation to Rick Owens, but that has always felt like an incomplete way of understanding her.Born in France’s Jura region in 1944, into a family shaped by the Resistance, Lamy studied law in Lyon, attended the philosophy lectures of Gilles Deleuze and worked as a criminal defence lawyer while also performing striptease and cabaret.In 1979, she moved to Los Angeles without having visited the city. There she established her clothing line, created Café des Artistes and Les Deux Cafés, and treated hospitality as a form of theatre.Around 1990, she hired a pattern cutter named Rick Owens. Their working relationship became a partnership in life, and by 2003 they had moved to Paris and were building Owenscorp together. Lamy’s work has since moved through furniture, jewellery, music, film, performance and boxing. She has variously described herself as a storyteller, performer and entrepreneur, resisting any single professional title.Joining her is her daughter, Scarlett Rouge, an interdisciplinary artist raised between California and France. The daughter of Lamy and experimental filmmaker Richard Newton, and Owens’s stepdaughter, Rouge trained in photography at CalArts before developing a practice across painting, installation, sculpture, video, textiles and performance.Her work draws on myth, symbolic language, Jungian thought and ritual, asking how art might reconnect spirit and matter. Mother and daughter have also performed together in LAVASCAR alongside Nico Vascellari.In this episode, we speak about resistance and freedom, Los Angeles, family and artistic inheritance, collaboration, ritual, commerce and the making of spaces in which outsiders can belong. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In today's episode Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar meets with design legend Michele De Lucchi. Born an identical twin, he grew up being treated, as he remembers it, almost as half of the same child. At 18, the brothers chose different disciplines, different cities and different appearances. His brother shaved; Michele grew the beard that has stayed with him ever since.“When you design something, you have to create an identity.”It is a wonderfully disarming beginning to a conversation with someone whose career runs through more than five decades of Italian architecture and design: Alchimia, Memphis, Olivetti, the Tolomeo lamp, major buildings, interiors, furniture, drawing, painting and sculpture. Yet I became less interested in making him recite that history than in understanding the person who has continued to question what design is for.De Lucchi speaks about objects as carriers of memory. His father appeared able to “listen” to a glass, a watch or a building and understand who made it, where and when. Function was never the whole story. Materials could hold a narrative; architecture could shape the life unfolding inside it.When I told him that his work makes me happy, he answered that it was the most beautiful compliment I could give him.“We don’t need pessimistic architects and designers because we don’t need a pessimistic future.”That may be the key to Michele De Lucchi. Radicalism, for him, is not a colour palette or a historical style. It is the courage to resist convention, grasp the energy of one’s own time and give form to a future worth entering.In the full episode, we travel from 1970s Florence to Olivetti and the beginnings of Memphis, but also into far more personal territory: his twin brother, Ettore Sottsass, a journey around the world, fashion, serendipity, meditation, AI and the unknown. Some stories are far better heard in his own voice, and I will not give them away here.Several of his designs will also appear in Radical Rooms, the exhibition I am curating for Mankovsky Gallery in Stockholm this August, bringing radical Italian design into conversation with contemporary painting. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.