In a veritable deluge of material conjunction, Franz West’s Untitled merges elements of painting, sculpture and installation, encapsulating the artist’s distinctive and multifarious practice. A culmination of papier-mâché and acrylic paint, West pairs his mesmerising textural surface with a steel constructed seat; the latter a continuation of his experimental furniture works he first started in the mid-1980s. Executed in 1990, Untitled marks the outset of West’s most crucial decade, during which his open approach to unconventional media consolidated his stylistic tendencies, resulting in a highly experimental and diversified oeuvre. Untitled thus stands as a significant and early work by West; befitting its importance, the present work was most recently exhibited at the artist’s major retrospective in 2019 at the Tate Modern, London, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Taking everyday found materials, West appropriated and manipulated various media for his examination of art’s relation to social experience. Employing papier-mâché extensively throughout his oeuvre, West found the material simple to use but with endless morphic possibilities. First used in his Passstücke (Adaptives) of the 1970s and later his Legitimate Sculpture and Combinations of the mid-1980s, West would layer glue-covered pages most often sourced from old telephone books into various constructions. While he employed a broad range of materials across his oeuvre, West’s affinity to papier-mâché stemmed from its association with the kindergarten – one of play and curiosity that defined his output. Painting over the paper with passages of acrylic paint, Untitled presents an intricately constructed surface rich in dimensionality that envelopes the viewer in its expanse – his very own material constellation.

West maintained a career-long interest with sculpture as a means to explore the ongoing dialogue between viewer and object, while simultaneously interrogating the aesthetic relations between sculpture and painting. The steel seat in Untitled is an outstanding example of how West understood the purpose of furniture; in his view, furniture was not only to be functional, but also an object of art. Much like his earlier Passstück: compact, portable, mixed media sculpture that were only fully realised as artworks when touched, held, worn, or otherwise physically engaged, he saw the chair as an extension of his early work. As he described, “a chair is an everyday Passstück” (the artist quoted in Tate, Franz West, 2019, online).

Coming of age in the era of punk, radicalism and artistic revolution, West was a Renaissance Man who drew inspiration from both contemporary and classical culture. Equally at home in discussing medieval animism as he was in debating theories of Dostoevsky and Wittgenstein, West demonstrated a thirst for knowledge that went beyond the cultural trends of his era. The filaments of post-war European art can be traced throughout his work, from the figures of Alberto Giacometti, to Dieter Roth’s objects, and the plaster surfaces of Jean Fautrier. His insatiable yearning for new ideas is reflected in the diversity of his practice. West sought to construct a truly international corpus that could reflect a global perspective, and in the present work, West exemplifies his life-long experimentation with sculpture. Firmly diverging from any static abstraction, Untitled is a work that encapsulates how West redefined sculpture for the modern age.