Press Release
Central to the exhibition Forst is the motif of the woodland, which has always been an unfailing source of attributions of all kinds: from a romantic haven of calm, to a realm of terrifying darkness, to the epitome of homeland. The works presented in Forst refer in various ways to the idea of clearing, yet defamiliarize the literal meaning of the term: while the installation from which the exhibition draws its title grotesquely reverses and accelerates the natural effects of the seasons, in Schwarzwald (Black Forest) the viewers become witness to a much slower erosion. The exhibition is complemented by a further series of Sailstorfer’s sculptures.
Through the artistic transformation of everyday objects and places, Michael Sailstorfer creates tangibly poetic images dealing with the states of euphoria to disintegration. Absurd failure and tragicomedy play as important a part in his work as the question of the space a sculpture is able to occupy: sometimes the viewers’ senses of hearing and smell are attacked. Sailstorfer’s often processual and theatrical works also operate within the tension between such contradictory concepts as homeland and remoteness, mobility and standstill, noise and quite, or light and darkness. Destruction, recombination, and transformation are his basic compositional principles. Despite the vehemence of his artistic metamorphoses, Sailtorfer’s works always have a characteristic background melancholy.
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