Emerging in an early-1970s Viennese art scene dominated by the legacy of the Wiener Gruppe and the meteoric rise of the Actionists, Franz West, unsurprisingly, was a loner for much of his career. A great believer in the potency of pleasure, he approached artmaking with a playful, mind-drifting everydayness, fusing it with social functionality – hardly in line with the heroic expressivity of the Wiener artists’ post-Dadaism nor with the severe, messianic existentialism of Actionism.
The first largescale institutional retrospective of West’s work – coproduced by Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern, to where the show travels in February – serves most of all as an exhaustive archival mission, setting out to catalogue a vast body of work that defies any standardised categorisation. Of West’s identified corpus of nearly 6,000 works, a couple of hundred are present here. The scenography, devised by longtime friend Sarah Lucas and containing drawings, videos, outdoor sculpture, paintings, furniture, etc, is realised in a carefree, pleasantly cluttered manner, vaguely resembling an artist’s studio or home, with discrete environments located in corners, passages and plinths bringing the viewer into the artist’s hard-to-explain but instantly recognisable aesthetic universe.
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