Name: Franz West
Start: 2023-03-09
End: 2023-04-15
Location: David Zwirner

Installation view, Franz West: Echolalia, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

We are pleased to present Echolalia (2010) by Franz West, on view through April 15, 2023, at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street space in New York.

Executed in 2010, only a few years before the artist’s death, Echolalia consists of seven colorful, larger-than-life sculptures that seem to stand slightly off-balance, interspersed with three cushioned divans. The work’s title—which refers to the repetition of words and sounds made by young children when learning to talk—was inspired by the artist’s son, who at the time of its creation was three years old and brought his own, distinct perspective to his father’s oversized works.

Franz West

Echolalia, 2010

Papier-mâché, foam, gauze, cardboard, wood, steel, acrylic paint, foam, and linen in ten (10) parts

Dimensions variable

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Not exhibited publicly in more than ten years, the work represents the apotheosis of West’s commitment to sculpture as social space, integrating the viewer within an immersive, total environment. Conceptually, the installation manifests the intersection of many of West’s ongoing interests—most notably, the playfulness of sculpture, the participation of the viewer, and the importance of language.

Franz West, Echolalia, 2010 (detail)

Franz West and Mary Heilmann. Photo by Adam Shopkorn

A voracious reader throughout his lifetime, West was constantly and consistently incorporating various philosophical, psychoanalytical, and historical lines of thinking in his work, as though language itself was another material one could work with.

When Echolalia debuted in Rome in 2010, West published excerpts from the readings that came to influence the work, which included writings from figures across eras and disciplines, including Jacques Lacan, William Shakespeare, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Mike Davis, Jean-Paul Sartre, Max Weber, and over a dozen others.

Installation view, Franz West: Echolalia, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

“West always produced his textual output in dialogue with others—not unlike the way he painted his sculptures.… He went back and forth about how to put something, and then he had no interest whatsoever about resolving the context. It really was about appropriating something through repetition, building familiarity by putting it into words—a tentative approach to ideas.”

—Andreas Reiter Raabe, artist

Installation view, Franz West: Echolalia, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

West’s sculptures and installations often invite the public’s interaction, engaging his viewers in order to subvert traditional exhibition models. In the mid-1970s, he began creating his so-called Passstücke, or Adaptives, a number of which are on view in a concurrent exhibition of West’s work at our Paris gallery.

These roughly hewn, abstracted sculptural forms were intended to be handled by the viewer in a manner of his or her choosing, thereby “adapting” the works to their own physical being and context.

Franz West and Janc Szeni performing West’s Passstücke in front of Haus Wittgenstein, Vienna, c. 1978. Photographer unknown

“Now some comments on Echolalia. The sculptures are mobile, which means … you can move and contort [them] the way you like best. When they are moved and who moves them … are questions of practical life and therefore beyond my sphere of responsibility.”

—Franz West

Installation view, Franz West: Echolalia, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

Extending this interest, in Echolalia, the individual sculptures are seemingly weightless and on wheels, meaning the exhibitor can hypothetically rearrange these elements, interacting with the sculpture and evidencing the artist’s longstanding fascination with spatial manipulation and play.

Installation view, Franz West’s Echolalia, 2010, on view in If you'd live here, you'd be home by now, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 2011

“[The] wonderfully looming yet weightless new Echolalia sculptures by Mr. West … cohabit effectively with some of his spindly-legged seating, here shrouded in white.… The setting feels like a kind of garden court, with the sculptures as odd-shaped, vaguely Disney-esque topiaries.”

—Roberta Smith, critic, The New York Times

Installation view, Franz West: Echolalia, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

From the Adaptives of the 1970s came West's earliest furniture pieces—which he conceived as both sculpture and a means for social experience—and by the late 1980s, furniture had become an important part of West’s aesthetic output. Once again influenced by Freud, the works allowed West to create a space for visitors to rest and reflect on the artwork and their experience of it, furthering his investigation into alternative exhibition models.

Sigmund Freud’s Vienna Office, 1938. Photo by Edmund Engelman, courtesy the Freud Museum, London

Installation view, Franz West: Auditorium, documenta IX, Kassel, 1992

Large-scale installations comprising furniture pieces include Auditorium (1992), which consisted of rows of sofas covered with Oriental-style carpets placed in a central plaza of documenta IX so that visitors could gather, sit, and reflect on the exhibition; Test/Rest (1994), an installation of sofas in patchworked, colorful fabric which was presented on the roof of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Dia Center for the Arts in New York; and 100 Days – 100 Guests (1997), in which West furnished a space for events and discussions at documenta X with metal chairs covered in colorful wax-print fabrics.

Franz West, Echolalia, 2010 (detail)

While interactive work remained characteristic of his practice, West became increasingly interested in autonomous sculpture in the 1990s, creating a series of abstract, painted papier-mâché and plaster forms that rest on unusual supports, humorously playing with the notion of the sculptural pedestal.

Sculptures from this period are often supported by found objects that include rolls of packing tape and paint cans, among other common materials, or in the case of Echolalia, stacked suitcases. Spoonerism (1996), now in The Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, is another noteworthy example featuring an oversized form delicately balanced on a suitcase pedestal.

Franz West, Spoonerism, 1996 (detail). Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York

“In recent years Franz West’s ‘Legitimate Sculpture’ has engendered almost classical forms, although its goals have remained unorthodox. Resulting from a sense of awkwardness about how to find a place for the Adaptive and legitimize it within the world of sculpture, large sculptural papier-mache constructions have been developed over the years, which reveal their mobile origins in the unusual mechanisms used to stabilize them on the ground or on a pedestal (cans, wooden sticks, spatulas, rolls of tape, roles of paper).”

—Veit Loers, curator

Installation view, Franz West’s Vorschein und Alltag (Pre-Semblance and the Everyday), The Renaissance Society, New York

West further expanded on his notion of “Legitimate Sculptures” in the late 1990s and 2000s, creating even larger and more colorful works that openly challenged traditional notions of monumentality and beauty, and frequently elided figuration and abstraction.

Early examples of these works include installations such as Vorschein und Alltag (Pre-Semblance and the Everyday) (1999–2000), shown here in West’s solo exhibition at the Renaissance Society in New York, and Three Times the Same (1998), which was shown at the 12th Biennale of Sydney in 2000.

Franz West, Three Times the Same, 1998

Installation view, Franz West: Echolalia, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

“Franz West puts together parts of the soul— terrifying and sweet, majestic and fragile, repellent and tender—and puts us back together in his work as in a great patchwork quilt: passstücke, sofas, chairs, movements, dyes, postures, carpets, videos, voices, gestures, perspectives, people, colors and feelings, things and passions like the image in the tapestry of the world that gives us meaning.”

—Denys Zacharopoulos, art historian and theorist

Franz West in his studio, Vienna, 1995

On view in Paris: Franz West

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Franz West

We are pleased to present Echolalia (2010) by Franz West, on view through April 15, 2023, at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street space in New York.

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Franz West

We are pleased to present Echolalia (2010) by Franz West, on view through April 15, 2023, at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street space in New York.

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