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.

Matthias Goldmann is a writer and translator. He has published essays, poetry, and stories, has created and exhibited computer text animations, and has cooperated with visual artists and authors on various projects and publications. Marina Faust is an artist whose work includes photography, collages, video, sculpture, and installations. She has been published in magazines such as the French art magazine Frog, Purple Fashion, Purple Journal, and Architectural Digest. She collaborated as a photographer for more than twenty years with fashion designer Martin Margiela. Her collaboration with Franz West, Talk Without Words, was shown at Gagosian Gallery London in 2012.