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David Zwirner is pleased to announce Echolalia, a major installation by Austrian artist Franz West from 2010, on view at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location in New York. The installation brings together several strands of inquiry that run throughout West’s decades-long career, integrating the viewer within an immersive, total environment. Not exhibited publicly in more than ten years, Echolalia represents the apotheosis of West’s commitment to sculpture as social space.
Emerging in Vienna in the early 1970s, West developed a unique aesthetic that engaged equally high and low reference points and often privileged social interaction as an intrinsic component of his work. By playfully manipulating everyday materials and imagery through novel means, he created objects that served to redefine art as a social experience, calling attention to the ways in which art is presented to the public, and how viewers interact with works of art and with each other.
Completed only two years before the artist’s death, Echolalia consists of seven colorful, larger-than-life sculptures that seem to stand slightly off-balance, interspersed with two cushioned divans and an armchair. The work’s title—which refers to the repetition of words and sounds made by young children when learning to talk—was inspired by the artist’s son, who at the time of its creation was three years old and brought his own, distinct perspective to his father’s oversized works while also pointing to the playfully abstract idiom of West’s multipart sculpture.
As West described, “I had the idea while watching my 3-year-old son looking up at the sculptures. The seatings make for alternative positions and viewing platforms throughout the show.... When I was younger, I thought it was all right to make the visitor uncomfortable. But now that I am older it would not be correct because my problems have gone.”1
The outsized sculptural forms elaborate on West’s body of “Legitimate Sculptures” begun in the 1990s—abstract, vibrantly painted papier-mâché and plaster forms that rest on unusual supports. Here, West has increased the scale of these forms, which variously balance on suitcases, trash cans, and paintbuckets that sit atop wheeled platforms, to be so large that viewers can imagine they are seeing these sculptures from a child’s perspective. He additionally bestowed several of the individual elements with humorous and irreverent titles including Zyste (Cyst), Phryge (Phrygian Cap), and Drunks, pointing to the importance of language in his practice. Like his Passtücke (Adaptives) from the early part of his career—roughly hewn, abstracted sculptural forms that are intended to be handled by the viewer in a manner of their choosing—West originally intended these sculptural elements to be manipulated by the viewer, literally allowing for multiple and shifting perspectives within the installation.
The sofas and chair, outfitted simply in white linen, likewise call back to West’s earlier work. Beginning in the 1980s, furniture became an important part of his aesthetic output, as it allowed him to create a space for visitors to rest and reflect on the artwork and their experience of it, thus privileging social interaction as a central component of his work. In the 1990s, he developed this concept further, executing several works that created variations on a lounge, cafe, theater, or lecture hall environment and also pairing furniture elements with his sculptures to create interactive tableaux. By integrating the seating within his field of sculptures in Echolalia, West brings together these varied approaches, situating the viewer directly within the work.
A concurrent exhibition, which surveys West’s career from the 1970s through the early 2000s, will be on view at the gallery’s Paris location from March 2 to April 13. Together, these shows mark the tenth presentation of the artist’s work at David Zwirner since 1993, when his solo exhibition, Investigations of American Art, inaugurated the gallery’s program. During his lifetime, West presented several solo exhibitions at David Zwirner, in 1993, 1994, 1996, 1998 (with Heimo Zobernig), and 1999. The gallery further organized an exhibition of the artist’s early work in 2004, a small survey in 2009, a show in 2014 that focused on work from the 1990s—which was accompanied by a catalogue published by David Zwirner Books, with essays by Eva Badura-Triska, Veit Loers, and Bernhard Riff—and, more recently, a 2019 overview of the artist's works in London.
Image: Installation view, Franz West: Echolalia, David Zwirner, New York, March 9—April 15, 2023. Courtesy of David Zwirner
