Franz West

(Austria) *1947 in Vienna; †2012 in Vienna

Franz West worked in a range of different media, producing collages and paintings as well as sculptures and installations. At the forefront of West’s sculptural oeuvre are his so-called “Adaptives” and seating objects – sculptures and furniture that the internationally renowned artist wants us to handle and sit on, and through which he demonstrates his firm belief that art should be “not just for looking at”. At the end of the 1980s West began creating large-scale outdoor sculptures. The painted aluminium “Sphairos” belongs to the collection of the Middelheim Museum and can be seen at “Blickachsen 10” in the Bad Homburg Schlosspark. Sphairos was the name given by the Greek philosopher Empedokles in his theoretical writings to a spherical god. Whereas this original Sphairos was visualized in terms of a regular sphere as a symbol of perfection, Franz West’s sculpture has been welded together out of irregular-shaped pieces of sheet aluminium into an uneven and fragmented spherical form. The gestural strokes of brown applied on top of the monochrome painted surface, and the drips of paint that have run down the sides, reinforce the impression of an object that has taken shape in freehand fashion.