from the catalogue: Franz West, 'Proforma', Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 1996
"Franz West has conceived this first retrospective as a very big "anti-exhibition." The show consists in a display of main sculptural and painterly works since 1979, but it appears to the viewer as a kind of storage in a furniture shop of homeless people. The exhibition appears like one big installation-collage, formed by fifteen sculpture-installations which are placed in a very calculated system of relations between each other. West's early "Passtuecke" and the signature-pieces from 1979 open up to the big room-installations of the last two years, with a remarkable continuity in West's unique way of dealing with materials (which comes from his past as an 'homeless-artist' in 70ies Vienna)." (source text excerpt)
