Franz West: Man with a Ball
This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Franz West: Man with a Ball at Gagosian, Britannia Street, London.
From abstract and interactive sculpture to furniture and collage, West’s oeuvre possesses a character that is at once lighthearted and deeply philosophical. Belonging to a generation of artists exposed to the Actionist and performance art of the 1960s and ’70s, West instinctively rejected the idea of a passive relationship between artwork and viewer.
The volume documents the over thirty sculptures in the show—lumpen totems, built from papier-mâché, polystyrene, and the odd cardboard box, which are then splashed, smeared, brushed, and dribbled every which way with bright clashes of paint. The book’s contents include a selection of forty-five outdoor sculptures made by the artist between 1998 and 2011, a photo essay by Marina Faust documenting the artist’s studio, and a text by Matthias Goldmann.