Edited by Reza Akhavan, Philipp Konzett, Heinz Neumann, Gernot Schauer. Text by Thomas Trummer, Andrea Überbacher, Peter Packesch, Robert Fleck, Heimo Zobernig.
A tribute to the Actionist-inspired artist celebrated for his ironic, vibrant sculptures, furniture and large-scale works
Hbk, 8.5 x 11.25 in. / 256 pgs / 284 color / 4 bw. | 7/2/2024 | In stock $69.95
Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited by Reza Akhavan, Philipp Konzett, Heinz Neumann, Gernot Schauer. Text by Thomas Trummer, Andrea Überbacher, Peter Packesch, Robert Fleck, Heimo Zobernig.
This landmark catalog was born from a collaboration among four collectors. Each sifted through their own holdings to curate an exhibition of the works of Austrian sculptor and conceptual artist Franz West (1947–2012). Accompanying the exhibition, this catalog features more than 400 works from West, distinguishing itself as the most comprehensive monograph on the artist to date. In the volume, West’s irreverent and playful oeuvre is well represented, featuring his early collage works on paper and his late abstract found-object sculptures and punk furniture pieces. Privat also features several texts that both illuminate underexplored facets from the artist’s transgressive practice and unearth delightful anecdotes about the artist’s eccentric nature. Thomas Trummer, director of Kunsthaus Bregenz, traces the influence of Freud and Joyce in West’s early works; Austrian artist Heimo Zobernig recounts West’s awkward run-in with the queen of the Netherlands.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited with text by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ines Turian.
Throughout his working life, Franz West (1947–2012) was a writer as well as a sculptor. He frequently augmented his pieces with texts, kept notes on his thinking, corresponded extensively with curators and writers, and through his brother, the actor and poet Otto Kobalek, was friendly with many writers of the Vienna Group. This book gathers these writings for the first time in English. Beginning with “Electrical Art” (c. 1975) and closing with “Redundancy” of 2011, these texts range in character from statements and considerations on artists such as Giacometti, Twombly and Kippenberger to poetical and aphoristic pieces, and letters written to Mike Kelley, Anthony Spira and Hans Ulrich Obrist, coeditor of this volume. Sometimes the writings of artists seem supplementary or secondary to the work; in this book, West is revealed as both an energizing thinker and a language artist.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited by Astrid Ihle. Text by Benedikt Ledebur.
Featuring music by Oliver Augst, Rüdiger Carl and Heimo Zobernig, this LP is a homage, in sound and design, to the artist’s book of the same name by Franz West (1947–2012), whose text fragments served as the raw material for singer and composer Oliver Augst, in a musical counterpart to West’s collage techniques.
A tribute to the long collaboration between Franz West (1947–2012) and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, this volume offers a comprehensive yet singular overview of the artist’s oeuvre. Gathering together extensive documentation and rare archive material on the numerous exhibitions they organized together from 1995 on, the book is introduced by art theorist and friend of the artist Max Wechsler, who followed West's work closely for many years, and whose illuminating foreword begins: “Without doubt, he was an odd bird, a gifted idler, a Vienna man sui generis and eccentric par excellence.” This publication underlines the importance of the gallery space as an artistic laboratory, and highlights an unusually creative relationship between an artist and his gallerist.
Published by Verlag für moderne Kunst. Edited with text by Agnes Husslein-Arco, Harald Krejci.
Vienna-based artist Franz West (1947–2012) often explored the way authorship is attributed to artworks through co-authorship and collaboration. This volume showcases his 2011 piece, “Extroversion,” in which 43 different works—by various artists—combined to upend West’s studio kitchen.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Text by Eva Badura, Klaus Goerner, Georg Grooelle, Peter Keicher, Andreas Reiter-Raabe.
The focus of this publication is Franz West’s (1947–2012) Kombi-Werke installations, in which greatly differing individual pieces are brought together and then recomposed into new works. Gathering elements such as fittings, furniture, sculpture, videos and works on paper from all periods--and even works made by artist friends--into grand ensembles, the Kombi-Werke are without doubt key elements in West’s legacy. An example is the three-part papier-mâché sculpture “Redundanz”: its starting point is the gouache “Lost Weight” (1994), with its motif of a dieting woman showing her oversized pants. Omitting the “W,” West transforms “Lost Weight” into “Lost Eight,” in order to derive the title for a larger work, “Where Is my Eight?” With 250 color illustrations, this substantial and inspiring volume, and the exhibition it accompanies, were overseen by the artist himself, before his death in the summer of 2012.
Published by RM. Text by Patrick Charpenel, Michel Blancsubé, Veit Loers.
Since the mid-1960s, Franz West (born 1947) has been finding new ways to balance his art on the line between beauty and ugliness. At the age of 14, West--living in bombed-out, post-Nazi Vienna--attended an event organized by the Viennese Actionists, at which Hermann Nitsch smashed a lamb cadaver against the wall of a basement room in a tenement building: "it was incredibly shocking and really depressing," West said. His own art over the past four decades has eschewed such nihilism: his Adaptives, which he has described as "neuroses made material" (with a nod to Darwin as well), are sculptural objects for viewers to engage physically, using them as ungainly temporary prostheses, appliances, accessories, and instructional tools. White Elephant documents these, as well as West's important works of furniture and collage, and his marvelously awkward sculptures, which seem lumpily homely and unbalanced, or gangly and hopeful as a blemished teen.
For 30 years now, Viennese artist Franz West has been in his own artistic territory, and for the last 20, he has been one of the most influential working sculptors, as confirmed by a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1997. Through his "Passstücke" (passport pieces or adapters) of the 1970s, his furniture assemblies of the 1980s and bright exterior sculptures of the 1990s, West regularly irritates viewers with parody and outlandishness, and impresses with surprising solutions to the old social utopia of art and life. The implied invitation to touch his works disrupts the museum dynamic of velvet rope and burglar alarm, and leads to different levels of engagement--bodily, linguistic, philosophical and psychological--in which the artist's sense of humor shines through. This introduction to West's oeuvre is accompanied by commentaries, interpretation and details about his most recent work, developed over the past few years.
Published by Zwirner & Wirth. Essay by Eva Badura-Triska.
Franz West is widely considered to be one of Europe's most important contemporary artists, and he has reached that position without ever having needed to limit himself to a single medium or mode of expression. Like other artists who came of age in the midst of Conceptualism and Minimalism, his work has ranged widely and blurred the boundaries between art and life. The works showcased here, including autonomous sculpture and interactive pieces, were all made between 1972 and 1988, starting with the furniture with which he expanded our understanding of sculpture--a chair with a seat made of chains still stirs visceral reactions--and the photo-filled and always photogenic collages with which he seemed to join Pop. Early Work exemplifies the richness of West's early production, and Eva Badura-Triska's insightful essay traces through it the development of the theories and practices that continue to shape his work today.
PUBLISHER Zwirner & Wirth
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9.25 x 11.25 in. / 156 pgs / 93 color and 12 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 8/15/2006 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2006 p. 111
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780970888464TRADE List Price: $65.00 CAD $75.00
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.
PUBLISHER Kunsthaus Bregenz
BOOK FORMAT Clothbound, 8.25 x 11.25 in. / 285 pgs / 180 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 3/2/2004 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2004
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783883757261TRADE List Price: $60.00 CAD $70.00
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Peter Noever, MAK Vienna. Essays by Carlos Basualdo, et al.
Since the mid-1970s, prominent Austrian artist Franz West has created objects in which use is the most important criterion for reception. After creating "Fittings," plaster and papier-mache objects meant to be attached to the human body and interacted with by their wearer, and their logical extension, "seating equipment," West sought to create a setting for a new kind of experience. Merciless presents little-seen work which West has constructed over the past five years and which addresses these late concerns. Of special focus is an expansive installation West developed for the MAK in Vienna, the largest of his completed works to date.
Franz West: Notes
Franz West: Otium
Franz West
Franz West: Artistclub
Franz West: Where Is My Eight?
Franz West: White Elephant
Franz West
Franz West: Early Work
Franz West: We'll Not Carry Coals
Franz West: Merciless