The name of this work suggests the good-natured spirit that Franz West has brought to the contemporary art world. Long promised as the centerpiece of an exhibition opening in Portugal, it arrived at the very last moment, bearing this modest but cheerfully triumphant title. The five-part sculpture incorporates works West had made in the past as well as completely new components. The pink element, for example, was new; the tall yellow element was an older piece the artist modified with a wrapping of yellow duct tape; and the rabbit-shaped unit dates from a decade earlier.

West came of age during the heyday of the Vienna Aktionists, a group of physically aggressive, often violent performance artists in his native city. West disliked the Aktionists gory sensationalism, but he was imbued with the sense of art as something to be engaged with the body, actively produced and experienced. He called his first sculptural objects, made in the mid-1970s, passtücke, or in an approximate translation, "adaptives." The passtücke had no pedestals and were meant to be moved around freely by the viewer. By the mid-1980s, West also made sculptures that are not participatory but retain the bulbous informality, seemingly accidental surfaces, and friendly scale of the passtücke.

Displayed on narrow pedestals, the components of Delivery persuasively take their place in the family of sculpture, whether Roman portrait busts or the slender figures of Alberto Giacometti. But at the same time they are willfully and merrily different in their humble misshapenness and kindergarten colors, implicitly declaring that art can meet people at an ordinary level, not as something sublime and sacred. Twentieth Century Painting and Sculpture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2000), p. 152.