There are giants of the art world, and then there are true giants of the art world.
Martin Kersels -- sculptor, videographer and performance artist -- stands 6 feet 6 and weighs more than 350 pounds. To say that he is a big man would be a gargantuan understatement.
Usually, an artist's physical size bears little if any relationship to his work, but that's not true in Kersels' case. His art is often about scale -- his own girth but, more important, the idea of largeness and how that affects a person's movement through space.
In a career retrospective called "Heavyweight Champion," which opens Saturday at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, viewers can take full stock of an artist who looms large wherever he goes.
"I think about my size a lot, moving through the world being tall and overweight," Kersels said during a conversation at the museum Monday. "I sometimes feel like I'm out of sync with the culture. I use that feeling in my work, but I don't want it to be finger-pointing -- like everyone's so mean to me or, you know, fat people have feelings too."
He added: "I put it out there with an open-ended statement, like a question. It just is."
Upbeat and unsentimental, Kersels' artwork draws you in with its playfulness and lack of pretension. The current show, which originated last year at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in upstate New York, is the artist's first museum retrospective and represents the culmination of more than 20 years of work.
A Southern California native who grew up in Playa del Rey, Kersels started his career in the 1980s as a member of the performance art group Shrimps. He subsequently branched out into sculpture and assemblage, taking inspiration from his instructor and sometime mentor Chris Burden. But Kersels' work has always retained a performance-art subtext.
In perhaps his most recognizable images, the artist shows himself lifting a group of friends and throwing them individually through the air. The photographic series, which suggests a highbrow version of "Jackass," also depicts him hurling himself down a flight of stairs and falling on his face on a city sidewalk.
"I do get bruises and scratches," he explained. "But we try to do it in a smart way. There is some stagecraft involved -- it's all about the physics of movement and, in a way, it's a dance."
Kersels said the worst injury he has sustained was a badly cut arm during the making of his photographic series "Pink Constellation," in which the contents of a room collapse on him.
