All Photos By Gail

What if you could actually see what was going on inside someone’s head? Erwin Wurm offers his own wonderfully strange answer with It’s Not Me, It’s Not You (Mind Bubbles), a 2025 sculpture that was part of the artist’s Double Dream exhibit at Lehmann Maupin.

To me, the sculpture looks like a character from some surreal cartoon: A cloud head / body perched atop pair of extremely long, skinny legs that bend awkwardly beneath the enormous, amorphous form. The entire figure is rendered in a soft, dreamy pale blue  right down to its little lace-up boots.

Made from aluminum and acrylic paint, the sculpture measures nearly 6 1/2 feet tall and more than 6 feet wide. Despite its size, there’s something oddly vulnerable — and very funny — about it. There is no face or other recognizable feature to tell us who this character is or what it’s thinking. Instead, the giant floating form seems to be the thought.

That makes the title especially intriguing. It’s Not Me, It’s Not You suggests a separation between the person and whatever is happening inside their head. Isn’t that sometimes how our thoughts feel? They’re part of us, but they can also seem completely independent, taking up far more space than they should.

Wurm has long been interested in transforming the familiar human figure into something unexpected, often using humor and absurdity to make us reconsider the body. Here, he takes something we normally can’t see — our inner thoughts — and gives it a physical presence.

Double Dream Installation View

I love how the sculpture manages to be simultaneously bizarre, whimsical and strangely relatable. Those spindly legs look like they’re struggling to support an enormous mind that has simply become too big for the body beneath it. Maybe we’ve all felt like that at one time or another.