Concrete Porsche meets Fat Car: Gottfried Bechtold in conversation with Erwin Wurm at Galerie Krinzinger

Young men with bare torsos bend over a Porsche that looks very distressed. The speedy sports car is being prepared for the plaster cast. A short time later, Gottfried Bechtold would use it to create his iconic concrete Porsche – a motif that still pervades his work today.

The large prints of the photographs from 1971 are now hanging in Bechtold’s fourth solo show at Galerie Krinzinger, surrounded by small Porsches in plaster, glass and concrete in all colors, some fused with remnants of the casting molds.

This evening, there are two armchairs with a small table between them. This is where a “historical event” is taking place, as Ursula Krinzinger calls it in her introduction: Gottfried Bechtold is talking to Erwin Wurm. Bechtold is wearing beige corduroy trousers, a mouse-grey jacket and a dark sweater over a white shirt; Wurm is wearing black denim trousers with a blue denim jacket and a dark sweater. The evening is as casual as their clothes. They didn’t want a moderator, so they let themselves drift through the conversation in a relaxed manner.

Wurm tries an opening question: “What is your approach to the car?” Bechtold goes on: “The two of us are antipodean artists with very contrasting approaches to the subject of cars.” With this, Bechtold, who was born in Bregenz in 1947, opens an entertaining ping-pong of successive monologues. In 1970, he worked in a “very restorative scene with Wotruba and Prantl” and in 1971 “burst into it with his concrete Porsche. They didn’t accept it as a sculpture.” Wurm interrupts: Bregenz doesn’t understand Vienna, no one helps anyone here, everyone rejects everyone.

But Bechtold wants to stick to art: “I wanted to create a paradoxical piece,” he explains. A car is “a walking aid” and he has transformed it into the opposite. At the end, he gives the floor to Wurm with the provocative question of whether there is also a paradox in Wurm? This is a “main characteristic” of his work, Wurm replies dryly, “the paradoxical and the absurd”.

Now Wurm is able to expand, talking about his beginnings, when he actually wanted to study painting but was placed in a sculpture class. Fortunately, because this allowed him to create his “Fat Car” decades later – for the first time in 2001, since when he has varied and expanded the principle to include deformed architecture. The car, blown up beyond recognition, brings together themes such as consumerism, showing off and body ideals, as well as classic sculptural aspects such as the alteration of mass. “If you change the volume, you change the content.” Unlike Bechtold’s frozen cars, Wurm destroys the shape of the vehicles. “The car seems almost biological, it gets a face and a body.”

Bechtold returns to his work without transition. It took ten years for the Betonporsche to be accepted – he was so often far too early with his works. At documenta 5 in 1972, he was present for 100 days. Every fifteen minutes, his whereabouts somewhere in Kassel were announced over loudspeakers: Presence as a work of art. A few mutual assurances of appreciation, retrospectives and memories of his work later, Bechtold suddenly poses the question: “Where are we both going now?” Wurm: “Only downhill!” Bechtold didn’t want to talk about ageing: “But in art?” Wurm: “I’ll carry on doing my thing!” They both agreed on that.

The exhibition “GOTTFRIED BECHTOLD: 3 to 2 D” can be seen at Galerie Krinzinger until May 16, 2025.