“Erwin Wurm: Beauty Business” at the Bass Museum through March 4

Erwin Wurm, Austria’s inimitable conceptual prankster, has fascinated spectators with works that play at the margins of transformations and boundaries. Wurm once lodged a single-family home into the façade of a museum in Vienna and this past summer presented his version of an anorexic house at the 54th Venice Biennale. He has also amazed with scenes of folks in a pitched battle with their wardrobes in which they appear trapped in sweaters and struggle like contortionists to escape from their garments. For his beguiling show at the Bass, the Viennese virtuoso of the strange and beautiful combines elements of fashion and the everyday for his first cohesive focus on the dwelling. Wurm has cloaked museum walls in large-scale sweater pieces and installed smaller works such as Drinking Sculpture, a bar where visitors can serve themselves a swig. The piece is reminiscent of dusty furniture where one’s parents squirrel away bottles of Stoli and Bacardi.