»Franz West was a few years older than me, but I was younger than him and had the home advantage.«

With »GD WEST«, Gerald Domenig has created an artist’s book that is all about Franz West. It is a unique homage in text and image by one artist for another artist that has never existed in this form before.
Domenig had already met West in the 1970s, with the earliest photo dating from 1979. In 1988, the two artists held a joint exhibition at Portikus in Frankfurt, which is documented here in detail for the first time in photographs by Gerald Domenig. In the text section, the author Domenig interweaves his ideas with his pictures in an original way. He talks about getting to know and working with Franz West and repeatedly illustrates his memories with photos, but also with his own poems. It gives him great pleasure to write a review of this exhibition from 35 years ago. But he also emphasizes that »his report is without any guarantee«.
Domenig understands photography as a technique of image construction, of transferring space into the surface: »When I take photographs, I want to translate an image hidden in three-dimensionality, a latent two-dimensionality into a concrete image«. This can be seen very clearly in the chapter entitled »Kleine West Straat, Ostend, 2023«, in which he turns house facades, street views and flower pots into works of art. It is the oblique view of the seemingly familiar, the unfamiliar detail that is given loving attention here, briefly interrupting the passage of time and making us smile. But not in the sense of romanticization, but as a pragmatic-analytical, even realistic view of the world.

Gerald Domenig, *1953 in Villach, Austria; lives and works in Frankfurt/Main.