Franz West

Private Collection, Belgium (acquired directly from the artist) 

Private Collection, Belgium 

Almine Rech Gallery, Paris 

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2012

Malaga, Museo Picasso, The Grotesque Factor, October 2012 - February 2013, p. 328, illustrated in colour 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is lighter and brighter in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Forming part of West’s celebrated corpus of Lemurs Heads – a series that preoccupied the artist during the last two decades of his life – Lemurenkopf (Model for Knokke) from 2004 rejects and even proactively denounces artistic norms by displaying West’s unique combination of intellectual curiosity paired with playful intuition. The present work is also one of two smaller scale models created for the artist's monumental sculptures Koppen / Lemuren installed in the main public square of the Belgian seaside town of Knokke. Together these works comprise the only pieces within West’s oeuvre ever executed in Vubonite. This unusual ceramic material, which comprises a powder and liquid mixture, strongly resonates with West’s highly experimental approach to art-making: voluptuously amorphous and appearing as though wrapped in bandages of purest white, the likeness of a face is here abstracted and pared down to its nebulous and elemental form. Echoing the ancient and primitive aesthetic of African Fang masks or the famously miraculous stone effigies on Easter Island, this work harks back to mankind’s primal self-image. Herein, Lemurenkopf (Model for Knokke) presents a wonderful riposte to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. As derived from these twentieth-century thinkers, notions of philosophical clarity and the elemental nature of being resound throughout West’s oeuvre; this is demonstrated nowhere better than in the present work. Indeed, with particular recourse to Freud, the concept of psychoanalysis as a method to explore unconscious conflicts based on associations, dreams, and fantasies frame West’s exploration of the human self through his own idiosyncratic sculptural process.

Comprising a crudely articulated head with no eyes and only a rounded hole for the mouth, this work is archetypal of the acclaimed Lemurs Heads; a series first exhibited in 1992 at Documenta IX. The inspiration for creating these giant de-formed heads stems from 1987, when West was invited by the architect Hermann Czech to create ‘headstones’ for a bridge in Vienna. While the commission was never realised, West became increasingly interested in the sculptural project he had developed and consequently conceived the group of outdoor sculptures titled Lemurs Heads. Derived from a common Viennese phrase, ‘lemurs heads’ means to wake up with a hangover after a festive night of drinking and seeing ‘Lemuren’, or zombies. Invoking this dizziness and hallucinatory effect, the present work probes our subconscious drives by overcoming the boundaries between a perceived and actual sense of self, a sensorial impression that rests between imagination and true manifestation. The hand-made and intricate quality of these works’ white monochromatic surface is at once playful and ambiguous, tactile and intuitive, and provides further allusion to the absurd potential of the unconscious mind as heralded by Freud. Interrogating the somatic relationship between body and mind, the present work and the greater corpus of Lemurs Heads reject absolute terms in favour of openness, individuality, and fluidity.

Adamant that his art should break down the hierarchical boundaries between artist as creator and viewer as passive observer, many of West’s works, such as his early Adaptives sculptures from the 1970s (works that were intended to be worn and played with), embrace the viewer’s active participation. Similar to these early seminal pieces, the present work engages in an active dialogue with the viewer, demanding a level of physical interaction via different viewpoints through which to explore multifaceted surfaces and compositional possibilities. Where the early Adaptives were conceived in plaster, the present work’s unique materiality mimics the plaster-cast aesthetic of these works and yet emphasises the durability of West’s artistic vision – this piece was created to withstand the elements and survive as a lasting totem to the artist’s psychologically engaging and pioneering life’s work. As such, Lemurenkopf (Model for Knokke) is a powerful exemplification of West’s inquisitive practice in which cognition and imagination merge to convey the artist’s fascinating sense of human perception.