Bill Wurtz, known professionally as B. Wurtz (b. 1948, Pasadena, California), is an American painter and sculptor. He lives and works in New York City.
Wurtz received a BA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1980.[1]
Wurtz is known for his transformations of commonplace materials into sculptures. Wurtz's sculptures are characterized by an appreciation for the ubiquitous, common-place items he uses: plastic grocery bags, disposable baking trays, coat hangers, tuna tins, buttons, shoelaces, cardboard, and construction lumber.[2]
Wurtz's work has been described as a "bricolage of found objects."[3] He has shown his work widely in solo and group exhibitions internationally. He works in a variety of scales from small-scale sculptures to large-scale public sculptures. In 2015, The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, United Kingdom mounted a retrospective exhibition of the artist's work that traveled to La Casa Encendida in Madrid through 2016.[4] [5] In 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles mounted a major solo exhibition of his work, This Has No Name.[6]
His work has been reviewed in the New York Times,[7] Artsy,[8] Surface,[9] Artforum,[10] Frieze,[2] among other publications.
Wurtz's work is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art,[11] the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,[12] the Portland Art Museum,[13] among others.