Franz West - Möbelskulpturen / Furniture Works

Gagosian Gallery Madison - New York

...this is the art of today, lying down on the bed looking up into space. It doesn't matter what the art looks like but how it's used. The important thing is to find a place for art, not a description. --Franz West

In collaboration with the Franz West Privatstiftung, Gagosian New York is pleased to present Möbelskulpturen/Furniture Works by Franz West.

During his lifetime, West reimagined the viewing of art as an interactive rather than passive experience. The sensuous and highly distinctive art that he produced over the course of forty years transformed galleries and public spaces into engaging aesthetic environments. Rejecting the notion that sculpture should be seen but not touched, in the mid-1970s he created the first Passstücke/Adaptives, "ergonomically inclined" objects made from plaster, wire, and other materials. Viewers could pick up and handle them, observing how the body adapted to the portable sculptures. Soon West looked to even more utilitarian forms, further bridging the gap between art and life.

Parodying the bourgeois tradition of Austrian furniture design, in the early 1980s West began to produce "everyday adaptives"--schematic chairs, divans, tables, and lamps with welded steel- rebar armatures--either as stand-alone domestic items or components of larger sculptural installations. In 1992, he began creating large-scale furniture-installation works with the divans including Auditorium, a meeting place and open-air cinema at Documenta IX; Test (1994) at MOCA, Los Angeles, where they were arranged in rows at the entrance to the museum; and Rest (1995), a seating scheme for the rooftop of Dia Center for the Arts in Chelsea, New York.