But even these continued to grow, eventually evolving into considerably larger papier-mâché and cardboard works whose fragmentary shapes and distressed surfaces had an ancient mien, as if they had survived the vicissitudes of time.
Before he even noticed, he was creating objects too big to handle, entering the world of “legitimate sculpture”. The artist would sometimes invite others to apply paint or collage to their white surfaces.
Much of this later work was developed from ideas implicit in the Adaptives.
#Collage franz west portable
Originally interested in making paintings, West quickly turned to Adaptives, a small portable sculptures, before he started creating collages and sculptures large in size (that were public and colorful, from time to time). West chose interaction as his modus operandi, opposite to gruesomeness and violence of the Austrian movement known as Viennese Actionistsįranz West - Miniaturpassstücke I, II, II, 1983 (Left) / Passstück, 1983 (Right) - image courtesy of Hauser & Wirth Mature Period With, of course, one big difference – they were created with the intention to be worn, carried, held, or simply touched by the viewers, giving his practice a true interactive dimension. These works represented a truce between performance and art object and reflected the artist’s early admiration for the all-white reliefs and paintings of Piero Manzoni and Robert Ryman. Later, the artist sought an adequate English translation, and had to choose between Fitting Piece and Adaptive, preferring the translation and settling on the latter term. West described some of the art pieces that he’d made to his friend, poet Reinhard Priessnitz, and he coined the original German name for them – Passstücke. They were often created phallus-shaped or had some other sexual allusion behind them, and yet they always remained strongly attached to the abstract world. Called Adaptives or Passstücke, these pieces exist in their own universe of incompleteness and closeness to the body. Among his first well-known works are small amorphous objects that are meant to be touched, held, manipulated and contemplated. Nevertheless, he was inspired by his teacher Bruno Gironcoli, whose overblown sculptures of domestic objects influenced West in the development of his own distinctive idiom. Instead of gruesomeness and intense display, he chose interaction as his modus operandi, a feature that marked his entire career.īy deciding to begin his studies relatively late, it came to be that he already had an understanding of what he wanted to create. He once said that his first taste of the Actionist’s performance originated in screams of his mother’s patients, coming from her office next door to the family’s apartment. West renounced the physicality and existential intensity of that kind of work, focusing instead on benign and relaxed lightness.
He was familiar with the work of Vienna Actionists and their provocative performances that involved dead animals, self-mutilation, and masturbation – they were the dominant force in the Vienna art scene of the 1960s. The artist sometimes even stated that the only reason for him to start making art was to calm his mother, who was growing impatient of her son’s reluctance to do just about anything with his life.
He enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 1977 (when he was already 30 years old) and studied there under Bruno Gironcoli. In fact, for a number of years, he was completely clueless of a direction he would like to take in his life. With a frequently absent coal dealer father and a dentist mother (who did take him with her on art-viewing trips to Italy), West didn’t have much of an artistic pedigree. That very contact with the works allowed the viewers to temporarily enter the universe that West has been building carefully throughout his majestic career.įranz West - Passstück, circa 1980 - image courtesy of Hauser & Wirth Personal Life and Early Artworks He developed a personal style that longed for interaction – his works could only be truly understood if being touched, worn, or sat upon.
#Collage franz west free
Emerging from the tradition of Viennese Actionists (without actually belonging there), his early experiences include the cultural extremes of the movement and their attacks on bourgeois sensibilities, on one side, and constant attempts of his older contemporaries as they were struggling to free themselves from Vienna's illustrious heritage, on the other. By dismissing physical appearance of his artworks and focusing instead on the way they’ll be used, Franz West, an Austrian artist, shaped his artistic approach, employing it until the very end of his life.
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