Andi Fischer & Franz West - FEST
SchaulagerWien15, Opening 28th May, 2021, 2-8pm
We are pleased to announce the exhibition Andi Fischer & Franz West - FEST, opening on Friday, 28th May, at SchaulagerWien15 Vienna. This exhibition is the first artistic dialogue between fourteen new works by Berlin-based painter Andi Fischer (b. 1987) and the wide ranging practice of Austrian sculptor-provocateur Franz West (1947-2012), represented by a selection of eight objects and collages, covering three decades, 1972 – 1999. The works by both artists in this show mutually amplify shared artistic concerns and strategies, allowing us to re-think Fischer’s position as a young painter, as well as West’s well-established reception and its familiar interpretation.
Loaded onto over-dimensional canvases and, recently, also onto wooden objects, Fischer’s translation of mythological archetypes and old master motifs reflect an existential pictorial language that evokes an immediacy of painterly execution. In a balancing act between humour and seriousness, Fischer’s works demand a re-evaluation of contemporary aesthetics, questioning their often implicit link to legitimate skill and artistic competence. This exhibition features a new series of paintings, in which Fischer continues his investigation into the possibilities of reduced formal language, applied to the medium of sculpture and painting, which often stands contradictory to the common notion of artistic qualities.
In its open disavowal to be taken seriously as artistic mastery, Franz West’s nearly five decade long parodistic practice, ranging from sculpture, installation, collage and collective performance, has all along repositioned the role of the artist as skilful agent. His playful-amateurish production is highly visible in the range of sculptural objects that have marked West’s oeuvre from the beginning of his Passstücke or Adaptives since the early 1970s, his numerous seating installations, as well as a great number of papier-maché variations throughout later decades. Part of this exhibition are a series of early collages from 1972, which reveal West’s compositional playfulness and concern with communication that is reflective also of the artist’s lifelong reading of philosophy. Also presented in this exhibition are his Telefonskulptur (1993) as well as his Maulschelle (1980), objects that imbibe West’s humor and make visible the often erratic and shared working process in the studio, which led also to the creation of larger objects such as Pleonasm (1999).
A publication will accompany this exhibition, featuring a critical essay by art historian and political theorist Johannes Hoerning, who approaches Fischer’s and West’s practice as marked by the strategy of deskilling. Situating this strategy in its art historic context since Manet and via Duchamp to Fluxus, Hoerning shows that Fischer’s and West’s shared disavowal of manual virtuosity and artistic competence forms an important but hitherto unexplored part of their aesthetic concerns.
Andi Fischer & Franz West - FEST was organized by Åplus Berlin, Daniel Lippitsch, and Galerie Clemens Gunzer. This exhibition could be realized through generous loans of West’s works by the Burger Collection Hong Kong and in collaboration with FLUIDS Hong Kong. Visual archival material for the publication was kindly provided by the Franz West Privatstifung.
For additional information, please contact Hagen Schümann under mail@aplusaplus.de
Andi Fischer (b. 1987) lives and works in Berlin and graduated under Thomas Zipp from the UdK Berlin in 2018. His playful and spontaneous works on canvas reference mythological archetypes as well as old master paintings, which Fischer translates through gestural and chromatic reduction into a contemporary painterly canon. He was awarded the TOY Berlin Masters Award in 2018 and presented his latest solo exhibition “Tata ongart” at Åplus Berlin in April 2021.
Franz West (1947 – 2021) is an internationally renowned Austrian sculptor who emerged in Vienna in the early 1970s, studying at the Academy of Applied Arts from 1977 to 1982. West developed a unique, unbounded aesthetic grounded in social interaction, often extending his practice beyond sculptural objects to collage and performance. His work has been subject to a great number of international survey exhibitions and most recently subject to a major retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2018), which travelled to Tate Modern in 2019.
Johannes Hoerning is a doctoral candidate in political theory at Cambridge University and currently leading the research at the Marcel Duchamp Collection & Archive of Hong Kong’s new M+ museum. He recently published essays on Tetsumi Kudo, Paul Thek, and Sylvie Fleury, as well as a critical analysis of the political thought of French intellectual Pierre Rosanvallon. Johannes lives and works in Cambridge and Hong Kong, where he co-founded FLUIDS, a curatorial platform and publishing house.