Franz West (Man with a Ball)

This catalogue accompanies a major sculpture exhibition by the late Franz West held at Gagosian London in 2012. Belonging to the generation of artists exposed to actionist and performance art of the 1960s and '70s, Franz West made work that was vigorous and imposing yet free and lighthearted, where form and function were compatible rather than mutually exclusive. Prepared in close collaboration with the Franz West Privatstiftung, Man with a Ball features a forest of immense and individualistic standing sculptures the size of small people, four large-scale fiberglass assemblages that suggest the patchworked manufacture of old Lockheed aircraft, and large vitrines of "models," in which diminutive cardboard human figures appear together with West's own maquettes for large-scale sculptural projects, both past and future.