Caino va incontro ad Abele, 2010

Frank West
Gagosian September 16 - October 30 2010
www.gagosian.com

By Emelie Ask

As an artist working mainly with irregularly shaped sculptures - but also creating collages and performances - Franz West’s show Roman Room, at the Gagosian gallery in Rome, is well reflective of his artistic character and style. The exhibition includes two of his more recent sculptures; Caino va incontro ad Abele, and Echolalia. The sculptures are all large-scale and irregular in form, and these mysterious and intriguing characteristics are more profoundly pronounced in the latter work than in the former.
Frank West was born in Vienna, where he still lives and works, in 1947. As an artist developing much of his artistic career in Europe and Austria during the 1960s and 70s - at the time of Conceptual art’s boom, and the arrivals and peaks of Viennese Actionism and Performance art - West early on engaged with the notion of including the viewer in the art work, in order to complete it. The observer’s reaction to West’s work is therefore a fundamental aspect of the same, and a line along which West has been active from the beginning of his career. For this very reason, West has also designed furniture that are juxtaposed to the artworks in the gallery, and upon which the seated viewer is given a different perspective of the installation; to that, the furniture render the exhibition space a sociable and less dramatic venue where visitors can indulge in and discuss art. During his artistic career, West has worked with media as diverse as papier-mâchè, steel, and various natural materials for his collages.
Echolalia, from 2010, is composed of seven separate sculptures, in various shapes and colors, though fairly coherent in size. They are created of papier-mâchè, foam, gauze, cardboard, wood, steel, and acrylic paint; when juxtaposed to Gagosian’s white cube, the neat colors of bright pink, yellow and beige seem perhaps nicer and softer than they truly are, and the black and red figures are the only ones being loud and breaking up the gallery room’s otherwise laid-back atmosphere. The two figures composing the second work, Caino va incontro ad Abele, are mounted in the entrance hall and the visitor is therefore engaged with this piece immediately upon his or her entrance to the gallery. The medium is identical to that of the work in the larger room upstairs, though the size of these two figures are significantly smaller, and their forms are thinner and elongated. This order of installation possibly allows for the visitor to get acquainted with West’s style in a more careful manner in the entrance hall, before engaging with the larger and louder pieces, which at that point are yet to appear in the show. Also, the immediate contact with these works, upon the visitor’s entering the gallery, is reflective of West’s aim of integrating the viewers and rendering them active participants to his art works. Given the complex reading of West’s works, this is arguably a clever curatorial move, coupled with that of including solely two works of the artist, as the total number of figures allows for the relatively limited space at Gagosian to be fully exploited, and brightly so.