Franz West, the hard-living Austrian maestro-Mephistopheles of organic sculptures that veer between excremental visions, demonic beanstalks, sex toys for creatures from other dimensions — a great anti-formalist and colorist in his own right — died yesterday at 65. I met him once, in the early nineties, and he was so grizzled and gassed I thought he was 65 then.West became known in the seventies, a time when few European artists, let alone Austrian ones, could make much of a dent on the international art scene. I have vague memories from back then of seeing his work and thinking Wtf? Using papier-mâché, plaster, wire, wood, straw, and who-knows-what, topped off with scads of white paint, West made medium-size and portable abstract sculptures that come out of the sketchy semi-dead-and-alive figures of Giacometti, the bulbous constructions of early Claes Oldenburg, the smashed-up shapes of John Chamberlain, Cy Twombly's weird white anti-classical sculptures,...
- 7/26/2012
- Vulture
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