Franz west chandelier9/16/2023 Such a backdrop calms West’s postwar acid with Age of Reason alkali. With its beautifully proportioned rooms and deep-set windows gazing on to the tree-dotted landscape, Inverleith is the epitome of Enlightenment architecture. It’s a shame he never lived to see it as he would surely have been enchanted by its singular blend of exuberance and equilibrium. West’s rapport with Inverleith goes back to 2001 when the 18th-century mansion – host to a raft of top-notch contemporary shows – dotted the botanical gardens in which it stands with West’s goofy aluminium sculptures.Īccording to Inverleith’s curator Paul Nesbitt, plans for this show, which was made in conjunction with the Franz West Foundation, were under way when West died last year. Now pieces made by West and his collaborators are on display at Inverleith House in Edinburgh. From his earliest days, he made work in tandem with other artists, ranging from barely known Viennese graduates to such Arte Povera colossi as Michelangelo Pistoletto, the conceptualists Douglas Gordon and Sarah Lucas, to the contemporary abstractionist and sculptor Anselm Reyle and the Georgian-born painter Tamuna Sirbiladze, West’s wife. That democratic spirit saw collaboration become a cornerstone of West’s practice. Sarah Lucas and Franz West’s ‘Untitled – Not Finished’ (2012) © Michael Wolchover His predilection for furniture had another genesis too, partly inspired by a juvenile visit to Rome where he experienced the Spanish Steps as the equivalent of a village square somewhere that allowed people to be “sitting in the art consuming life.” He wanted to make “art you could get in touch with”. His kinky proto-genitalia and faecal gestures – for that is the primordial stuffing within his anti-Platonic forms – might poke fun at our psychosexual neuroses yet they bring them up close and personal too. West snubbed the melodrama but shared the sentiment. Their mission was to force their fathers to confront the violence of their past while simultaneously reclaiming art from the taint of commodification. Even without the political backstory, his memories of seeing his mother, who was a dentist, in a blood-spattered apron, and hearing the screams of her patients, are the stuff of Freudian case history.Īn obsession with neurotic gore was thoroughly explored by West’s predecessors, the Viennese Actionists, who masturbated and mutilated themselves throughout the 1960s. His own parents were communists, Jewish on his mother’s side. He remembered playing in filthy, debris-littered streets where virtually all the residents had been Nazis. Born in Vienna in 1947, he grew up in a city lacerated by its war record. West never denied that his humour sprang from dark sources. His invitations to perch on the sofas and chairs felt like commandments: thou shalt giggle thou shalt chill out. His squidgy, effervescent, papier-mâché efflorations sent shivers up my spine, as did his collages of fashion, porn and newspaper images. He would bring art to the masses yet make them chuckle too. Yet while the coal-and-sackcloth statements of Jannis Kounellis, for example, declared that art was a serious business, West’s profferings – zany, bulbous sculptures, kinky collages and funky furniture that he encouraged spectators to sit on – labelled him a cheeky Lord of Misrule. Franz West is often described as the arch joker in a pack of late 20th-century sculptors known for their irreverent cornucopias of materials.
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