13 Works

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce B. Wurtz: 13 Works, opening October 30, 2025, at 545 West 20th Street. The exhibition is the second presentation of Wurtz’s work at the gallery, and the artist’s fifty-eighth solo show to date.

Drawn from the past seven years of work, the exhibition features a selection of pieces that have never before been publicly displayed: a group of hanging, floor-, and wall-based sculptures, a collagraph print, and Untitled (Assembly), 2023–2024, a tabletop presentation consisting of dozens of individual assemblages made from children’s blocks.

From the beginnings of his career in the early 1970s, Wurtz’s sculptures have incorporated found objects drawn from the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. Through deft, alchemical interventions, Wurtz transforms his humble materials—empty cans of tuna fish, discarded lengths of 2 x 4 lumber, plastic bags, cotton socks—into discrete formal arrangements of remarkable levity and sophistication. Notable throughout Wurtz’s work is his ethic of directness: he leaves the individual recycled components of his work undisguised, presenting his found materials plainly and with minimal adornment. “I don’t like to obscure what a thing is,” Wurtz has said. “I like that it has a use value and that it keeps that little history with it.” That history can also change over time, as when items become obsolete or are revealed as painfully obvious pollutants of the planet.

Shaping Wurtz’s practice is a simple guideline: His sculptural materials invariably relate, directly or indirectly, to one of three basic human needs—sleeping, eating, or staying warm. (The lumber builds the homes that we sleep in; the socks cover our feet; the containers hold our food). From this loose rubric, his work becomes an intimate meditation on our habits of consumption. The pieces are unmonumental monuments to our contemporary condition—winsome, absurd, and fully human.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent B. Wurtz.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born 1948 in Pasadena, California, B. Wurtz received a BA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, in 1980. The sculptor and painter currently lives and works in New York.

Wurtz has been the subject of 58 solo exhibitions at prestigious venues including: Feature Inc. (1987, 1991, 1992, 2001, 2003, 2006, New York); Gallery 400 (2000, Chicago); White Flag Projects (2012, St. Louis); Kunstverein (2015, Freiburg, Germany); and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, (2015, Ridgefield, Connecticut). In 2015, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom mounted a retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work that traveled to La Casa Encendida, Madrid through 2016. In 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles mounted a major solo exhibition of his work, This Has No Name.

His work has also been included in over 174 group exhibitions including: Pandora’s Box: Joseph Cornell Unlocks the MCA Collection (2011, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago); Building Blocks: Contemporary Works from the Collection (2011, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence); and Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s (2018, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.). In 2018, the artist created his now iconic Kitchen Trees for the New York City Public Art Fund, transforming City Hall Park with towering columns of colorful colanders exploding with plastic fruit.