Franz West - Contemporary Art and Design Evening Sale New York Tuesday, March 3, 2015 | Phillips

Contemporary Art and Design Evening Sale

New York Auction 3 March 2015 6pm

  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

  • Catalogue Essay

    Suffused in various pictorial and avant-garde practices of post-war European art, the work of Franz West is a marriage of composed delicacy and participatory objects. Borrowing the the elongated figures of Diego Giacometti and the manifold formal satire of Sigmar Polke, the artist decidedly distanced himself from the divisive Viennese Actionist’s existential throes to animate engagement with his viewers in lively dialogue. o.T. (model) from 2007 is one such realization of this iconoclasm, in which forms and figures vie for aesthetic dominance and the idea of art as autonomous is utterly crippled. The domestic materials, of wood, foam, and paper, are at once complemented and abrogated by the clean linear elements of the figures and their deeply saturated colors, particularly the coppery tones of the figure’s pants. The central coral element, serving as a barrier between the duopoly of figure cutouts, halts communication in the tableau—where are these figures in space, in what time, in what place? As both an acute amalgamator and trenchant adaptor, the present lot demonstrates West’s lateral journey to contemporary art, reflecting and jiving, producing a boundless multimedia landscape that incites an effective blending of sculpture, painting and collage. The artist himself thoughtfully explained, “One may think that I try to bring the art object out into the world since my works sometimes appear to have a practical function, but really it's the other way around: things in the world can, under certain special circumstances, enter the realm of art. And, in fact, once they have entered this realm they are art.” (Franz West in "A Thousand Words: Franz West", Artforum, vol. 37, no. 6, February, 1999)

23

Franz West

o.T. (model)

2007
wood, acrylic, paper, foam, acrylic paint
21 1/8 x 21 1/8 x 18 1/8 in. (53.5 x 53.5 x 46 cm)
This work is accompanied by an Archival Confirmation document issued by the Franz West Privatstiftung Archiv.

Estimate
$70,000 - 100,000 

Contact Specialist
Amanda Stoffel
Head of Evening Sale, Contemporary Art
New York
+ 1 212 940 1261

Meaghan Roddy
Head of Sale, Design
New York
+ 1 212 940 1266

Contemporary Art and Design Evening Sale

New York Auction 3 March 2015 6pm