黑料不打烊

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present the exhibition Franz West: Die fr眉hen Werke / Early Works with sculptures and objects from 1975 to 1990 by the Austrian artist Franz West (1947-2012 in Vienna, AT) from private collections, in particular from that of his longtime mentor, the former gallerist and curator Peter Pakesch (b. 1955 in Graz, AT) and of Galerie Eva Presenhuber. The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication, photographs by Friedl Kubelka, and film screenings by Andreas Reiter Raabe and Bernhard Riff in an adjacent space. It will be the twelfth exhibition at the gallery since the beginning of the collaboration between West and Eva Presenhuber. 

In the vibrant, ever-evolving art world, where the contemporary triumphs over the past, artists, with few exceptions, fall through the cracks of attention after their deaths. Stimulated by the new, what was once so fresh gradually fades into oblivion, contrary to the notion of eternity鈥攊nevitably, seemingly naturally, and in some cases foolishly and completely unjustifiably. Such was the case with Franz West, who was awarded the Golden Lion for his life鈥檚 work at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, a year before his death. In 2015, his unique and incomparable work entered into an exciting and insightful dialogue with that of the American artist Cy Twombly at the Museum Brandhorst. The close artistic kinship between the two artists, despite their biographical and geographical differences, was highlighted, as was the powerful influence West exerted on his contemporaries precisely because, out of an inner defensiveness, he never succumbed to the mainstream, the fashionable, or the overly conventional. Despite his international success, which began in the 1980s, and despite the 200-work celebration of his art curated by Christine Macel and Mark Godfrey at the Centre Pompidou in 2018 and the Tate Modern in 2019, it has apparently not sufficiently filtered through how far ahead of his time, and indeed our time, he was. What the philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote in The Principle of Hope about the past, which has an inherent unfulfilled surplus, is perhaps the best way to understand the Austrian鈥檚 artistically rich legacy in terms of vision, interpretation, and enjoyment.