B. Wurtz

May 28 - June 28, 2024

The Pit Palm Springs

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The Pit is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by New York-based artist B. Wurtz. The exhibition is on display from May 28-June 28, 2024. Join us for an opening reception on May 25, 2024 from 5-7pm.

It began when I was about six or seven years old. 

In his father’s Santa Barbara woodshop, the young B. Wurtz found his compulsion to assemble, starting with the wooden offcuts that he glued together into small houses. While attending graduate school at CalArts in the late 1970s, Wurtz’s innate drives found resonance in a long lineage of readymakers, appropriators, and combiners, going back to Duchamp, of course, but more immediately under the guidance of CalArts faculty member Douglas Huebler. In an artist statement for a 1969 exhibition at Seth Siegelaub Gallery, Huebler wrote: “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more. I prefer, simply, to state the existence of things in terms of time and place.” 

Wurtz found his interest in the abundant objects of the quotidian—those things whose practical use and ubiquity have pushed them into the background of daily activity, ranked in the visual landscape alongside grass and paving tiles. They are, at least to most, uninteresting. The objects Wurtz selects, combines, and alters, all point to this under-acknowledged, underappreciated landscape of consumer goods that tirelessly attempts to evolve and reinvent itself while functioning to serve basic, unchanging, universal human needs, right at the base level of the hierarchy: food, clothing, and shelter. Arguably disposable, but ultimately indispensable.

Drawing attention to these objects in his work for nearly a half century, Wurtz has also pointed to the flux through which archetypal utilitarian forms evolve over time to meet both the needs and the desires of consumer culture. As metonymic totems, the objects stand in place for the more “practical” constructions in which they appear: food wares, clothing, and architecture. But in Wurtz’s studio, their selection and surface treatment enters the realm of taste—both in terms of what Wurtz is personally drawn to (in stark contrast with Duchamp’s claim that taste has nothing to do with his object selection), and the sectors that produce them to attract just enough attention to turn a profit and compete in the marketplace. 

The pieces in this exhibition express the primal interests that preceded Wurtz’s art education and the interests he has picked up along the way. Small assembled sculptures begin with wooden bases not unlike his father’s woodcuts. Wires adorned with buttons, thread, mesh packaging, a bottle cap, sprout upward, expressing architectural qualities with a bit of Calder thrown in, but are also suggestive of the sensitive balance and tension found in ikebana arrangements. The designs at the bottoms of disposable aluminum baking pans are painted in rich contrast, conjuring more than a century of geometric abstraction while also calling attention to a feature that fervent home cooks may hardly notice. 

Yet the designs are not fixed quantities. They are just as prone to the veiled mechanisms of industry as cars and toothbrushes. Perennial articulations likewise expand the baking pan lexicon. Wurtz is, of course, tuned in: “I’m always looking out for new patterns.” But even within Wurtz’s practice, innovation—or more accurately, discovery—is a driving force, a value that has kept his interest, and kept his work interesting. It is about always looking out, always. “I really think it’s important to do something you don’t know how to do,” Wurtz says. If you don’t know how to do something, you create the circumstances to do something new that hasn’t been done before. 

But his work with found objects isn’t only about innovation, or compulsion; it is a kind of collaboration. The encaustic paintings, on view for the first time in this exhibition, began with the tight spirals and plastic container lids, but, according to Wurtz, there wasn’t enough to them. So they sat in wait in the studio. Eventually the other objects—his collaborators—found their way to them, buttons and drywall screws, as if out of their own necessity. Not for food, clothing, or shelter, or the needs we have, but some other secret hierarchy of need these objects have, which was never considered during their life of intended use.

The Pit Palm Springs is now open from Tuesday - Friday from 11am-5pm and Monday by Appointment.

For further information, please contact the gallery at info@the-pit.la.