Gagosian Gallery In Rome Hosts Artist Franz West

Lemure Heads, by Franz West, 1992

What I like most about art is that art is a form of communication that can be understood by people all over the world, no matter the nationality of the artist and of the viewers. Certainly that some works of art need to be viewed through artist’s nationality and era in which they live, but sometimes this is not necessarily and what counts most is the originality and the feelings that the artist transmits to the viewer.

The same happens with the work of Franz West, a sculptor born and living in Vienna. He was one of those artists who rejected the traditional relationship between artwork and viewer, which was a passive one. In the seventies he began to break this tradition by making a series of small, portable, mixed media sculptures called Adaptives. These objects could not be perceived as complete by the viewer until they were held, worn, carried or performed with by the viewer.

Since then, West continued to make amorphous sculptures that became exploration sites for the public. By being able to “work” with the sculptures, visitors continually acted and reacted with the objects and with the places of the exhibition, being thus part in the process of creation. In this way, his furniture designs and subversive collages try to go beyond the imposed limits that separate art from life.

The new work of Franz West can now be viewed at the Gagosian Gallery in Rome, until October 30, 2010. His new work exhibited there is a transformation of basic shapes into irregular large-scale constructions. His sculptures are works of art that create unexpected results by combining different types of objects with different types of materials. He uses buckets or trashcans as pedestals for his sculptures made of papier-mâché, cardboard, polystyrene, and other objects. They are also impressive because of their height, some of them measuring over 3 meters high, which might be difficult to view, unless West has already thought about it. He placed sofas at the exhibitions, that allow visitors to sit comfortably and to experience the works from different angles.

Some of his works are also religious in subject, although with a different vision that comes from the use of materials, such as Caino va incontro ad Abele, while others are completely whimsical and intriguing. Nevertheless, his work brings new experiences for the viewer and tries to make them get more involved in what art is considered to be: a process of exposing feelings and ideas.