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 and70s, West instinctively rejected the traditionally passive nature of the relationship betweenartwork 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 (Passstucke). 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."