Franz West

Franz West worked with various media, including sculpture, installation, drawing, and collage, with his work focused on communication and participation in both artistic production and recep-tion. Central to this is the dissolution of traditional boundaries between works, in which not only the finished object but also the process of its use and interpretation by others becomes relevant. In addition to his own extensive body of work, which aims to redefine the concept of sculpture, he therefore also collaborated with other artists, creating joint installations that generate social situations.

Since the 1970s, West has been developing what are known as Passtücke (Adaptives), which he crafted from various materials such as plaster or metal. These wearable objects, often described as prosthetic extensions of the body, only become true works of art through the physical interaction of the viewers. He also conceived other works inspired by furniture in this vein — they invite use and integrate the audience as an integral part of the work. The artist often staged the various objects with friends and colleagues.

The exhibition features three works from a multi-part series by West in which he combines gouache, magazine clippings, and photographs on cardboard. What all three of these unusually elongated collage-like material paintings have in common is that West integrates a painted-over photograph of Oswald Wiener into each: In these, Wiener presses his lips together into a grimace and appears against a flatly painted gray-white or white-gray background. The titles of the works are ambiguous and can be read as allusions to Wiener: Ossi aussi Ossi, Demagog, and Dialoge (Dialogues). In two of the collages, West placed small, unidentifiable figures in opposite corners of the picture plane. These figures appear to be handling an adaptive in different ways. In the work Ossi aussi Ossi, however, these figures are replaced by an indefinable, pointed object positioned on a surface.
The works seem to focus less on a linear narrative and more on the visualization of an idea or a conceptual model — perhaps one that can be linked to Wiener’s theories on introspection and inner perception. They thus appear as open arrangements in which perception, fragment, and meaning are related to one another. They can be read as visual fields of thought in which physical experience, linguistic reflection, and pictorial composition overlap.

Ossi aussi Ossi, 1984
Gouache, photograph, magazine page on corrugated cardboard
35,5 × 126 cm, framed
Courtesy Cathy Fiscus, Vienna

Dialoge, 1984
Gouache and print, paper collage on cardboard
31 × 91 cm, framed
Courtesy Sammlung Philipp Konzett, Vienna

Demagog, 1984
Mixed media, collage on corrugated cardboard
31 × 19 cm, framed
Courtesy Heinz Neumann, Vienna