Franz West

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce a major sculpture exhibition by the late Franz West. West was actively engaged with the preparation of this exhibition up until his untimely death earlier this summer.

Belonging to the generation of artists exposed to Actionist and Performance Art of the 1960s and 70s, West instinctively rejected the traditionally passive nature of the relationship between artwork and viewer. Being equally opposed to the physical ordeal and existential intensity insisted upon by his performative forbears, he made work that was vigorous and imposing yet free and light-hearted, where form and function were roughly compatible rather than mutually exclusive. In the seventies, he produced the first of the small, portable, mixed media sculptures called Adaptives (Passstücke). These "ergonomically inclined" objects become complete as artworks only when the viewer holds, wears, carries or performs with them. Transposing the knowledge gained with these formative works, he explored sculpture increasingly in terms of an ongoing dialogue of actions and reactions between viewers and objects in any given exhibition space, while probing the internal aesthetic relations between sculpture and painting.

Ever more daring and imaginative configurations resulted, and the freshness and immediacy of his aesthetic approach made him a favorite of the contemporary exhibition circuit. In a stream of sculptural situations, each one more distinctive and unforgettable than the next, he transformed public spaces into sociable aesthetic environments while his furniture designs and subversive collages further challenged the boundaries between art and life.

In a forest of standing sculptures the size of small people, West's persistent irreverence with the principles of classical sculpture is evident. Lumpen totems, built from papier-mâché, polystyrene, and the odd cardboard box, are splashed, smeared, brushed, and dribbled every which way with bright clashes of paint. They have immense and individualistic personalities, like exotic meteorites come to land. Each one is fashioned into a top-heavy form teetering on a spindly stem, a sculptural formula in which contingency and equilibrium grapple to improbable effect.