Franz West: Echolalia
David Zwirner is pleased to announce Echolalia, a major installation by Austrian artist Franz West from 2010, on view at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location in New York. The installation brings together several strands of inquiry that run throughout West’s decades-long career, integrating the viewer within an immersive, total environment. Not exhibited publicly in more than ten years, Echolalia represents the apotheosis of West’s commitment to sculpture as social space.
Emerging in Vienna in the early 1970s, West developed a unique aesthetic that engaged equally high and low reference points and often privileged social interaction as an intrinsic component of his work. By playfully manipulating everyday materials and imagery through novel means, he created objects that served to redefine art as a social experience, calling attention to the ways in which art is presented to the public, and how viewers interact with works of art and with each other.
Completed only two years before the artist’s death, Echolalia consists of seven colorful, larger-than-life sculptures that seem to stand slightly off-balance, interspersed with two cushioned divans and an armchair. 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 while also pointing to the playfully abstract idiom of West’s multipart sculpture.
Image: Installation view, Franz West: Echolalia, David Zwirner, New York