Franz West: We'll Not Carry Coals Published by Kunsthaus Bregenz. Edited by Eckhard Schneider. Essays by Gudrun Ankele, Rudolf Sagmeister, Ludwig Seyfarth and Andrea Überbacher. Foreword by Eckhard Schneider. What Franz West began in the early 1970s with his hand-size “body growths”--the Adaptive--has since then mutated into a fertile living environment of sculptures, collages, furniture ensembles, walk-in rooms, and rooms to sit in. Organized into five chapters, each of which corresponds to a floor of the Kunsthaus Bregenz, where a surreal retrospective of West's work was recently mounted, We'll Not Carry Coals offers a serene presentation of the artist's witty, tongue-in-cheek body of work. From Haini, 60 squeaky blue-green plastic armchairs modeled on a carved-out tree stump, to Corona, a giant outdoor sculpture modeled, perhaps, on bendable drinking straws, West's work tickles the viewer somewhere between the diaphragm and the retina. Published in close cooperation with the Franz West Atelier, this book also features 50 heretofore unpublished collages from the artist's personal collection.
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