Franz West Retrospective at Centre Pompidou Reveals Artist's Playful, Body-Centric Oeuvre

A major retrospective of Franz West's work opened at Centre Pompidou in Paris on September 12, 2018, running through December 10, 2018. The exhibition, co-produced with Tate Modern where it will travel in February 2019, presents hundreds of works from his nearly 6,000-piece corpus. West, who emerged in Vienna's 1970s art scene, developed a distinctive practice focused on pleasure, social functionality, and the human body, diverging from the dominant Actionist and Wiener Gruppe traditions. The show includes his early Mutter Kunst ballpoint drawings from 1970-73, created to please his mother, and his famous Passstucke (Adaptives) from 1974—small, organic sculptures designed as wearable prostheses. Also featured are the Labstücke series from 1986, where found objects like bottles are engulfed in papier-mâché, and his exploration of color's corporeal impact. The installation Auditorium (1992), with 72 divans, invites visitor interaction. Scenography by Sarah Lucas arranges drawings, videos, outdoor sculptures, paintings, and furniture in a cluttered, studio-like environment. West's work engages bodily, psychic, and linguistic registers, with titles like Causeuse (1988-89) and Deutscher Humor (1987) revealing playful contradictions. His approach influenced later artists like Gelitin and Lucas, positioning art as a system intertwined with life.