“As a body, you stand or walk around the sculpture. It is almost equivalent to your own corporeality, to taking up space in one’s own three-dimensionality in a defined art space. As far as sculpture is concerned, the viewer is more or less obliged to engage in movement.”
With its asymmetric shape and organic colour palette, Franz West’s Untitled from 2002 resembles a moss-covered rock glittering under the soft morning sunlight, evoking the meticulously arranged geological formations that decorate traditional Japanese gardens and palace grounds. Appearing as if it has weathered the endless passage of t.mes , the sculpture exudes a zen-like aura of serenity and invites the viewer to meditate on its understated beauty. Like the organicism of Yves Klein’s sponge sculptures, West’s papier-mache sculptures mimic the natural world, growing and evolving in nature. The porous, undulating form is a shining example of West’s preoccupation with the external world, with the artist explaining, “I don’t construct things from out of the void and place them into the world. I face the world and I respond to its demands the best I can. That’s the way I work – not constructive but responsive” (Franz West quoted in, Eva Badura-Triska, Veit Loers, and Bernhard Riff, Franz West: the 1990s, New York 2014, p. 9).
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Image: © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
Artwork: © Succession Yves Klein c/o ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022
West’s vast and varied artistic output transcends genre, drawing from both contemporary and classical culture. As the art historian Darsie Alexander explains, "There is a distinct look to West's work that defies quick visual digestion. Fundamentally sculptural in construction, it veers frequently towards the biomorphic and the prosthetic, mines the intellectualism of Freud and Wittgenstein, and possesses an awkward beauty that speaks with equal fluency to the aesthetics of painterly abstraction and trash art... With its alternately crumbly or sleek surfaces, the work beckons human touch in an environment where such demonstrative reactions are strictly forbidden" (Darsie Alexander in: Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Franz West, To Build a House You Start With the Roof: Work 1972-2008, October 2008 - January 2009, p. 49). His insatiable yearning for new ideas is reflected in the diversity of his practice, which covers mediums ranging from drawing to sculpture, from collage to performance.
With its biomorphic form and layers of clashing colours, Untitled exemplifies the artist’s decades-long experimentation and refinement of sculpture. Coming of age in the era of punk, radicalism and artistic revolution, West was a Renaissance Man who drew from both contemporary and classical culture. Equally at home in discussing medieval animism as he was in debating theories of Dostoevsky and Wittgenstein, the artist demonstrated a thirst for knowledge that went beyond the cultural trends of his era. At once light-hearted and deeply philosophical, West’s oeuvre redefined sculpture for the modern age.
