Franz West. In & Out. Alicia Chillida

This exhibition is a good opportunity to get to know one of the most singular figures of the contemporary scene, in a retrospective exhibition that covers the decisive stages of Franz West (Vienna, 1947), who since the late sixties has developed a work that confronts art with the spectator, in an attempt to emphasize the physical and perceptive possibilities of art.

West's beginnings in the art world are marked by a strong rootedness in the creative maelstrom that prevailed in the Central European artistic environments of the sixties. West is influenced by various philosophical systems, such as Freud and Wittgenstein, and also alludes to other artists such as Klimt, Gerstl or Nitsch. According to Harald Szeemann, the representations of his works "recall the Viennese café culture, reminiscent of endless conversations in which the sublime rubs shoulders with the vulgar, conversations held from the back of overstuffed armchairs that have not been repaired since 1910 (...). The ugliness of the beautiful, the beauty of the ugly".

In this context, West begins to produce his Adaptable. These unfinished, unpolished and uncleaned figures of plaster and other poor materials raise enormous contradictions in the viewer, as well as laughter, since the viewer can look in a mirror and contemplate himself manipulating those objects that the author says personify our neuroses and invites us to play with them. These sculptures are based on African cult objects and masks. When coupled to the human body, West tries to discover the neurotic side of people, their wildest aspect, producing in the viewer a disturbing sense of surprise. It is the same with his Collages. In them, West appropriates standard images of our consumer society and excludes, through thick and energetic strokes of paint, everything that surrounds the faces. The result is heads whose scale and proportion are altered, so that our impression is that we are contemplating disjointed faces, detached from the body.

The exhibition takes a look at another of the most relevant creative processes in West's career. These are the pieces of furniture that he began to produce in the early eighties and that he continues to produce. The author introduces into the exhibition spaces a series of chairs and couches on which the viewer can sit and undergo an intense and intimate confrontation with art. In the same way, as with the Adaptable and the Collages, these pieces of furniture, with a rough and uncomfortable appearance, force the viewer to adopt implausible postures. These pieces of furniture evolve towards a greater formal simplicity, and as they are produced with industrial materials, they acquire a greater aspect of serialization.

In & Out is the title chosen by the artist for the exhibition. It alludes to his desire to introduce sculptures initially intended for outdoors in the Museum, in an attempt to subject the viewer to a greater receptive and perceptive challenge of the work of art... and any subjective meaning implicit in it. As Alicia Chillida says: welcome to the free associations that language fosters! You are invited to interpret any object you find before your eyes.