During the 1990s, Franz West’s work moved in new and innovative stylistic directions, as his career was solidified through important international exhibitions. This publication delves into this significant decade in an effort to contextualize the evolution of West’s singular practice. The 1990s proved critical in the development of the idiosyncratic style for which West is still known today. His key innovations from this period—which included the addition of exuberant color to his papier-mâché forms, the incorporation of furniture both as art object and as social incubator, and the inclusion of work by other artists in his own installations—resulted in dynamic, frequently interactive installations that helped to expand the possibilities of sculpture and the ways in which art is experienced. Produced on the occasion of David Zwirner’s 2014 exhibition in New York, this fully illustrated publication gives an in-depth overview of the decade, arguably the most important of the artist’s lengthy career. It features essays by noted West scholars Eva Badura-Triska and Veit Loers, as well as a personal account by Bernhard Riff on video collaborations made with the artist throughout the 1990s.

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce a major sculpture exhibition by the late Franz West. West was actively engaged with the preparation of this exhibition up until his untimely death earlier this summer. Belonging to the generation of artists exposed to Actionist and Performance Art of the 1960s and70s, West instinctively rejected the traditionally passive nature of the relationship betweenartwork and viewer. Being equally opposed to the physical ordeal and existential intensity insisted upon by his performative forbears, he made work that was vigorous and imposing yet free and light-hearted, where form and function were roughly compatible rather than mutually exclusive. In the seventies, he produced the first of the small, portable, mixed media sculptures called Adaptives (Passstucke). These ergonomically inclined objects become complete as artworks only when the viewer holds, wears, carries or performs with them. Transposing the knowledge gained with these formative works, he explored sculpture increasingly in terms of an ongoing dialogue of actions and reactions between viewers and objects in any given exhibition space, while probing the internal aesthetic relations between sculpture and painting."

The focus of this publication is Franz West's (1947-2012) Kombi-Werke installations, in which greatly differing individual pieces are brought together and then recomposed into new works. Gathering elements such as fittings, furniture, sculpture, videos and works on paper from all periods--and even works made by artist friends--into grand ensembles, the Kombi-Werke are without doubt key elements in West's legacy. An example is the three-part papier-mâché sculpture "Redundanz" its starting point is the gouache "Lost Weight" (1994), with its motif of a dieting woman showing her oversized pants. Omitting the "W," West transforms "Lost Weight" into "Lost Eight," in order to derive the title for a larger work, "Where Is my Eight?" With 250 color illustrations, this substantial and inspiring volume, and the exhibition it accompanies, were overseen by the artist himself, before his death in the summer of 2012.

Influential Austrian artist, Franz West (1947-2012) had been writing texts, notes, remarks and aphorisms non-stop since 1977.He attached these texts to his sculptures, continuing the sculptural expression linguistically without illustrating or explaining.In places the titles, epithets and texts can raise awareness of the sculpture's form, in others they can drive the viewer mad or fascinate like the cryptograms of a lingual alchemist.Texts accompany Franz West's complete oeuvre. Thus far, more than 200 have been created and they are published here in their entirety for the first time in a newly edited form, as facsimiles and in transcriptions.The Franz West retrospective exhibition is taking place at Centre Pompidou, Paris (autumn/winter 2018), and at TATE Modern, London (spring/summer 2019).There was a major Franz West exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2014.

A tribute to the long collaboration between Franz West (1947-2012) and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, this volume offers a comprehensive yet singular overview of the artist's oeuvre. Gathering together extensive documentation and rare archive material on the numerous exhibitions they organized together from 1995 on, the book is introduced by art theorist and friend of the artist Max Wechsler, who followed West's work closely for many years, and whose illuminating foreword begins: "Without doubt, he was an odd bird, a gifted idler, a Vienna man sui generis and eccentric par excellence." This publication underlines the importance of the gallery space as an artistic laboratory, and highlights an unusually creative relationship between an artist and his gallerist.

Franz West is widely considered to be one of Europe's most important contemporary artists, and he has reached that position without ever having needed to limit himself to a single medium or mode of expression. Like other artists who came of age in the midst of Conceptualism and Minimalism, his work has ranged widely and blurred the boundaries between art and life. The works showcased here, including autonomous sculpture and interactive pieces, were all made between 1972 and 1988, starting with the furniture with which he expanded our understanding of sculpture--a chair with a seat made of chains still stirs visceral reactions--and the photo-filled and always photogenic collages with which he seemed to join Pop. Early Work exemplifies the richness of West's early production, and Eva Badura-Triska's insightful essay traces through it the development of the theories and practices that continue to shape his work today.

Spengler's work describes how we have entered into a centuries-long "world-historical" phase comparable to late antiquity, and his controversial ideas spark debate over the meaning of historiography.