Franz West

About

Spanning his more than four-decade-long career, the exhibition offers an overview of the artist’s singular and influential body of work, and, in particular, his radical repositioning of traditional notions of sculpture.

Emerging in Vienna in the early 1970s, West developed a unique aesthetic that engaged equally high and low reference points and often privileged social interaction as an intrinsic component of his work. By playfully manipulating everyday materials and imagery in novel ways, he created objects that served to redefine art as a social experience, calling attention to the ways in which art is presented to the public, and how viewers interact with works of art and with each other.

On view on the ground floor will be a group of drawings and collages from the 1970s that share the irreverent aesthetic and humour of West’s sculptures. In his earliest drawings, West depicted figures in enigmatic scenes that are at once familiar and dreamlike. Often set against backgrounds that are empty or characterised by domed or curvilinear architectural elements, figures are rendered in outline or naively simplified forms and shown alone, in passive groups, nude, and at times in voyeuristic scenarios. Consistent with his later collages (a number of which will also be on view) and sculptures, his figurative drawings of this period convey a mood of comic unease through the discordant relationships between people, objects, and their environment.

In the mid-1970s, West began creating his so-called Passstücke, or Adaptives. These roughly hewn, plaster-and-papier-mâché sculptural forms are intended to be handled by the viewer in a manner of his or her choosing, thereby ‘adapting’ the works to their own physical being and context. Many of the forms are reminiscent of everyday objects, allowing the viewer to make loose associations while still handling the objects in an autonomous and unconditioned way. West later produced a group of painted aluminium Passstücke for his solo presentation at the 1990 Venice Biennale, several of which will also be presented here, as a means of revisiting and reworking his own artistic past.

In contrast to his Passstücke, the works presented on the gallery’s first floor anticipate the development of West’s notion of ‘legitimate’ sculpture beginning in the late 1980s, which would become the dominant areas of his practice in the 1990s and 2000s. Using the same materials as his Passstücke, West began producing painted abstract sculptural forms, which were displayed on plinths, as floor sculptures, or mural reliefs and were meant to question the aesthetic ideal of the autonomous work of art by presenting a work that, on first appearance, might be somewhat confounding to the viewer. Sculptures from this period display West’s characteristic wit and sly humour; many, for example, are supported by found objects that include rolls of tape and paint cans, among other common materials, or by pedestals that could easily also serve as cupboards or alcohol cabinets (West leaves their use to the discretion of the owner), and bear incongruous titles drawn from philosophy, mythology, and literature (of which the artist was an avid reader).

The 1990s proved critical in the development of the idiosyncratic style for which West is still known today. Key innovations from this period, which included the addition of exuberant colour to his papier-mâché forms and the incorporation of furniture both as art object and as social incubator, resulted in dynamic, frequently interactive installations that helped to redefine the possibilities of sculpture and the ways in which art is experienced. Characteristic of this period, Pleonasme (Pleonasm) (1999) is vaguely reminiscent of an outsized human head resting on a tabletop covered in bubble wrap, with its ‘mouth’ holding a red, plastic bucket. Other works, such as the three-part sculpture Symbol (1999), are playful studies in repetition and difference.

West further expanded on his notion of legitimate sculpture in the 2000s, creating even larger and more colourful, painted works that openly challenged traditional notions of monumentality and beauty, and frequently elided figuration and abstraction. For example, in Sisyphos I (2002), a large rock-like mass that sits precariously atop a bucket of paint, West implicitly draws a parallel between the myth of Sisyphus futilely pushing a boulder up a hill and the act of artistic creation. Likewise, in Das linke Horn Moses (Moses’s Left Horn)(2004), biblical and art-historical imagery is conjured in the artist’s signature tongue-in-cheek style.