Franz West - Contemporary Artists - Phaidon 1999

In 1992, the public square behind the Museum Fridericianum at Documenta IX, Kassel, was trasnformed into a glorious salon, with ranks of metal sofa draped with rugs and fabric: a new kind of public art for weary exhibition visitors. Combining the history of art (reclining icons such as Manet's Olympia, or Goya's La Maja Desnuda), with Freud's celebrated couch in the artist's native Vienna, and with socially interactive type of art, this installation - like Franz West's other works - evoke at once the personal and the public. Emerging from the Aktionism generation of 1960's Viennese artists who used their own bodies in their art, West is an internationally renowned Austrian artist who often incorporates the bodies of his spectator into his sculpture.
West's works often quite literally illustrate the viewer's involvement in contemporary art, whilst questioning the 'service' an artist ought to provide for the art-loving public.

160p - EN - 25x29cm - softcover - great condition