They shape-shift depending on how you look at them (at some points they’re faces, at others a landscape or exploding nebula) and, given West’s belief that an audience’s response is half of the artwork, their titles are just as likely to refer to your ponderings on what the hell they are as the cheeky chat between murmuring sculptures. Daubed with riotous colours, these rough head-like bundles of Papier Mâché possess bulging features and gaping mouths and appear to be nattering amongst themselves. As well as these Passstücke, highlights of the Wakefield show include two similar sculpture clusters, Das Geraune (Murmuring) and Parrhesia (derived from the Greek ‘to speak freely’). Whereas their approach was to force their pieces upon participants, West’s method was a lot softer, suggesting people may or may not interact with his sculptures as they pleased. Franz West (16 February 1947 25 July 2012) was an Austrian artist. Self-taught West began practicing in the 1970s, largely reacting to the Vienna Actionists, a disparate group of artists that experimented with performance and public engagement. Franz West was an Austrian artist who produced contemporary sculpture, collages, furniture and installations. And it’s true, with an extra long collar bone or a cylindrical arm the size of a bollard you do feel self-conscious, mischievous or just plain daft – so much so that the Hepworth Wakefield has provided a curtained area so you can interact with the adaptives in private without fearing a critical gaze. West’s thinking was that holding or supporting one of these bizarre additions makes you perceive your own body and your surroundings in a different way. White Elephant documents these, as well as Wests important works of furniture and collage, and his marvelously awkward sculptures, which seem lumpily homely. West is probably best known for his Passstücke (roughly translated as Adaptives) – Papier Mâché wearable forms that resemble protruding skeletal sections or extraneous limbs. But in Where is my Eight?, a new exhibition celebrating the work of late Austrian artist Franz West at the Hepworth Wakefield, that kind of eccentric behaviour is actively encouraged. His abstract sculptures, furniture, collages and large-scale works are direct and unpretentious. With works that playfully manipulate everyday materials and imagery in novel ways, he created objects and installations that redefine art as a social experience, calling attention to the way it is presented and how viewers interact with works of art and, in turn, with each other.At most art galleries, if you picked up the sculptures and started wearing them, you’d be escorted from the building pretty sharpish and possibly sent for some kind of psychological evaluation. Franz West brought a defiant vision into the pristine spaces of art galleries. The aesthetic he developed in his own work engaged high and low cultural references in equal measure and encouraged direct interaction with art as a way to explore the positioning of the body and the status of art in daily life. West grew up in Vienna in the aftermath of World War II-a period he described as “a very conflicted time”-and saw avant-garde performances by the Viennese Actionists during the 1960s. Showcasing the striking physical presence and formal qualities of his work, the retrospective also aims to explore the philosophical dimensions of the artist’s practice and its unique social sensibility. Several monumental open-air sculptures from the latter part of West’s career will be on view in the Pompidou’s lobby and in front of several other museums and institutions in the Marais district. The nearly two hundred works on view demonstrate the full breadth of West’s oeuvre, beginning with rarely seen drawings from the early 1970s and his first Passstücke (Adaptives)- the sculptures for which he became well known-to his papier-mâché works from the 1980s and Lemurenköpfe (Lemur Heads), made in the 1990s, as well his collages, furniture works, and collaborations with other artists. Curated by Christine Macel, chief curator at the Pompidou, and Mark Godfrey, senior curator at Tate Modern, London, where it will travel in February 2019, the exhibition spans West’s influential career and draws on major loans from institutions including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and MUMOK, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, in the artist’s hometown of Vienna. The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris presents a comprehensive retrospective of the work of Franz West, who died in 2012. 20, 2019 – June 2, 2019įranz West, L’Art pour l’Art (Art for Art’s Sake), 1973-1997, Mixed media (including paint, collage, magazine advertisements, cardboard stickers, newspaper, fabric, posters, wood, metal, and glass) in 23 parts, dimensions variable
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