Franz Erhard Walther

Through Oct. 26 . Peter Freeman, Inc., 140 Grand Street, Manhattan; 212-966-5154, peterfreemaninc.com.

You appreciate the importance of minimalism, but can’t abide its froideur; you appreciate the importance of performance art, but find it indulgent or inscrutable; you appreciate the importance of fiber art, but wonder if it’s really just craft. We can help make sense of this! All you need is Franz Erhard Walther of Germany, whose drawings, gouaches and soft sculptures in his ebullient, lavishly beautiful retrospective, “Migration of Forms, 1956-2006,” at Freeman reveal the power of all these avant-garde tendencies at once.

Since the late 1960s, Mr. Walther has created soft sculptures of canvas or cotton that can be hung on the wall, folded like a blanket, or even worn on the body. Here on a platform are Bordeaux-tinted canvas cones that look like folded dunce caps, and gray sheets with cutout head holes; on a wall are triangular and semicircular constructions whose sides droop and pucker, while more than a dozen foldable boxes fill the floor.