Franz West (1947–2012) brought a punk aesthetic into the pristine spaces of art galleries. His abstract sculptures, furniture, collages and large-scale works are direct, crude and unpretentious.

Born and based in Vienna, West collaborated with numerous artists, musicians, writers and photographers. West's work is typically made out of plaster, papier-mâché, wire, polyester, aluminium and other, ordinary materials. He started to produce paintings, but then turned to collages, sculptures, portable sculptures called Adaptives or Fitting Pieces", environments and furniture – welded metal chairs and divans, some minimally padded and upholstered in raw linen. For his early sculptures, West often covered ordinary objects—bottles, machine parts, pieces of furniture and other, unidentifiable things—with gauze and plaster, producing lumpy, grungy, dirty-white objects". In the late 1990s, West turned to large-scale lacquered aluminium pieces, the first (and several after) inspired by the forms of Viennese sausages, as well as the shapes of the Adaptives. With their monochrome colors and irregular patchwork surfaces, these works were also meant for sitting and lying. It doesn't matter what the art looks like but how it's used. – Franz West