Description: In 1995 the Austrian Franz West transformed the terraces of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles into a glorious salon, with ranks of metal sofas draped with bright African fabrics: a new kind of public art for weary museum visitors. Drawing respiration from the history of art (reclining icons such as Manet's Olympia), psychoanalysis (Freud's sofa in West's native Vienna) and a socially interactive type of art, his work is at once both personal and public. As one of Europe's best-known sculptors, West is regularly invited to such major surveys as Skulptur. Projekte in Munster and Documenta. He has gained particular recognition for incorporating the bodies of his spectators into his sculpture, producing oddly-hued forms called Passstucke ('adaptives') -- plaster sculptures designed to be worn, and which contort the wearer into bizarre positions.

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