Franz West: Die frühen Werke / Early Works
Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Maag Areal, Zurich
June 13 – December 12, 2025
All images courtesy of Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Franz West never played by the rules, and even now—thirteen years after he died in 2012—his work continues to delight, provoke, and stubbornly resist interpretation. Franz West: Die frühen Werke / Early Works, now on view at Galerie Eva Presenhuber’s Maag Areal space in Zurich, gathers a compact but unruly constellation of pieces spanning from 1973 to 1992. Rather than offering a formal retrospective, the exhibition feels more like a livewire conversation: raw, awkward, funny, and strangely intimate, much like the artist himself.
At the core of West’s practice is a collision between bodily experience and formal experimentation. Two works in particular articulate this tension with striking clarity. In one untitled sculpture from the late 1980s, West fuses the language of furniture and assemblage into a form that defies both use and convention. Shaped like a table or therapeutic cot, the object balances on two flared, pyramidal legs. The top surface is inset with what looks like a sun-bleached drawing or stained cardboard, bordered on either end by sculpted rolls that echo headrests—though uncomfortably so. Covered in a crust of paper mâché and painted white with deliberate imprecision, the piece hovers between welcome and repulsion. It offers itself as a place of rest, only to refuse that function at the last moment.
The humor, of course, is Westian. What appears provisional is pointed. His use of cheap, humble materials is not simply an anti-elitist gesture, but a deeper challenge to sculptural decorum. A table can be an existential proposition. A resting place can become a site of psychic unease.
No less compelling is a group of four pedestal works that greet the viewer like characters in a slapstick play of modernism undone. One piece—a glossy black plank propped precariously on a foamy, multicolored base—leans forward with theatrical instability. Another features a crumbly column of painted cement, like a totem caught mid-disintegration. A third stands proud in white austerity, but sits atop what resembles a carpet remnant, and the last—a squat, lumpen form encrusted in vivid crusts—reads like a failed laboratory experiment. These works, ranging from the late 1970s to early 1980s, share a deliberate awkwardness. Each resists monumentality, elegance, and coherence.
They also resist the pedestal itself. In West’s hands, the plinth is not a support but a foil—a straight man to the sculpture’s punchline. As the gallery notes in the exhibition text, West was deeply invested in “painterly surfaces and anti-elitist aesthetic strategies.” But it’s the discomfort he stages—the friction between support and object, art and joke—that leaves a lasting impression. These works don’t demand interpretation so much as provoke your presence. You don’t read them; you deal with them.
There is humor here, too, though it’s the dry, nihilistic kind that ripples through Viennese Actionism and postwar psychoanalysis. West’s objects leer, droop, and confront. They demand your attention and then mock you for giving it. The installation at Presenhuber allows viewers to toggle between abstraction and bodily reference, furniture and refuse, sculpture and stage set. The rhythm is not linear but improvisational—like encountering the artifacts of a performance you were never invited to but somehow ended up part of.
If there’s a thread holding it all together, it’s West’s belief in art as a social act. His sculptures are less about objecthood than about dialogue: between artist and audience, art and use, impulse and refinement. “I make art so that I can learn something,” West once said. This Zurich outing, focused on the early years, shows us where that learning began—rudely, hilariously, and with radical generosity.