Franz west5/20/2023 ![]() Instead of gruesomeness and intense display, he chose interaction as his modus operandi, a feature that marked his entire career. He once said that his first taste of the Actionist’s performance originated in screams of his mother’s patients, coming from her office next door to the family’s apartment. ![]() West renounced the physicality and existential intensity of that kind of work, focusing instead on benign and relaxed lightness. He was familiar with the work of Vienna Actionists and their provocative performances that involved dead animals, self-mutilation, and masturbation – they were the dominant force in the Vienna art scene of the 1960s. The artist sometimes even stated that the only reason for him to start making art was to calm his mother, who was growing impatient of her son’s reluctance to do just about anything with his life. He enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 1977 (when he was already 30 years old) and studied there under Bruno Gironcoli. ![]() He studied art intermittently while leading a life, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, that he describes as “pretty catastrophic” ridden with drugs and aimless travels, amid café existentialists. “Every forty minutes, a new patient was screaming”. The family lived in a housing project “full of old Nazis” where his father sold coal and his Jewish mother was a dentist, working in their apartment with primitive equipment. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…īorn in, Franz West grew up in postwar Vienna, where children played in bomb ruins. This column is a tribute to artists, living or dead, who have left their mark in Contemporary Art. His abstract sculptures, furniture, collages and large-scale works are direct, crude and unpretentious. Today is the occasion to bear in mind Franz West (-), who brought a punk aesthetic into the pristine spaces of art galleries.
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