FRANZ WEST (1947-2012)

“In historic art museums ... you find tables and chairs in the exhibition spaces that are not to be used,” Franz West explains. “I used to ask myself the same sort of questions that they would ask, like, 'Is that art disguised as furniture or is it furniture disguised as art?' or 'What gives these items of furniture the right to be in these rooms?'" (F. West in conversation with A. Spira, 2003, reproduced in V. Loers, Franz West, Cologne, 2006, p. 138).

A trained sculptor, Franz West began designing chairs, tables, and lamps in the 1980s in response to the bourgeois furniture which was popular in his native Austria at the time. By the 1990s, museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Dia Center for the Arts, New York began to display his chairs. The chairs represent West's exploration of the relationship between art and objects, a subject not often examined by fine artists.