Imagine
a vintage green and white German police car, converted by magic
into a battery of drums, ready for the energetic hammering of an
excited rocker. Try and visualize an old firewood stove, tucked
in the corner of a log-cabin, itself burnt down to the last log
in that very stove. Or figure out a lighted urban lamp-post, thrown
in the air like a missile from a Mercedes equipped with a launching
pad. Those are some examples of recent works by the young German
artist Michael Sailstorfer, whose first personal exhibition outside
Germany we are happy to present before he takes part in Manifesta
and the Sydney and Liverpool Biennials. Michael Sailstorfer likes to dismantle vehicles and other objets, for such action allows him to understand, from the inside, any type of contraption in his environment. But after dismantling, his aim is to reconstruct and give a new birth to the original object. Through this metamorphosis, involving both toiling and playing, he strives to create under a new name a work which starts a story mechanism. Thus the missile-launching Mercedes tells the story of a shooting star (Sternschnuppe) and the disembowelled body of a bus without wheels offers a glimpse of a love encounter (Dean & Marilou). The exhibition at attitudes will comprise, inter alia, two new sculptures : on one hand, Bethlehem, a vehicle made of a giant glass star on a carrier-tricycle; on the other, Hangover, a large candlestick whose candles have been replaced by bottles of beer meant to be drunk on the spot.
The
exhibition of Michael Sailstorfer is supported by IFA
(Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V., Stuttgart). solo show
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