Michael sailstorfer – livie

We are pleased to show new works by Michael Sailstorfer in the second solo exhibition of the artist at the gallery. Both in a metaphorical and literal sense: Sailstorfer detaches various elements of the empirical world from the context of our everyday experience and presents them in formally precise sculptures as semantically redefined objects that question the principles of our contemporary culture.

Driven by a fascination with biological and mechanical processes, Sailstorfer detaches natural, industrially produced, or found materials from their original context and transforms them into aesthetic settings that expand familiar questions about form and the nature of sculpture to include social, political, and economic aspects. The twenty bronze sculptures C Batterie 1 — 20 , , are the centerpiece of the exhibition Batterie at Livie Gallery on Claridenstrasse 34 in Zurich.

Cast in bronze, they show a light bulb with its socket, connected to a lemon and subsequently overgrown by a bee colony with a honeycomb structure. These forms were placed by a beekeeper into hives in spring to allow the colonies to continue working on them.

For his first solo show at Livie Fine Art, Berlin-based artist Michael Sailstorfer presents a body of new paintings in dialogue with three sculptural.

After 3 to 4 months — at the end of a summer — the structures were removed from the hives and cast in bronze. The work of the bees was thus manifested or inscribed into a specific form for an indefinite future. The visual result of this experimental arrangement is a dramatic material transformation of an existing icon of the visual arts.

It involves 20 concrete individual cases of an organic process whose rules and limits are programmatically or systematically given, but whose final appearance could only be influenced by the artist to a limited extent.

Michael Sailstorfer was born in in Velden, Vils, Germany.

This is done with the intention of making visible a very specific social organization. Without wanting to overemphasize the reference to Beuys, the analogies are obvious: the analogy to the sun, to light, to shadow, to the bloom, to the lemon, to the wax, to the honey, to the productivity of the individual in the collective. The second work in the exhibition space is titled Tank 1.

It is the empty fuel tank of a VW Passat, which, in its placement in the white box of the exhibition space, takes on anthropomorphic — that is, humanoid — features and possibly specifically recalls an oceanic mask. A breathing sound is emitted into the room through a speaker inside this hollow object. The references that this object creates are also multifaceted: the empty energy carrier of a car becomes the cavity that serves the propulsion and ventilation of the atmosphere of a common space.

Taking into account sociology, psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, and art history, Sailstorfer expands the medium of sculpture through transdisciplinary and transmedial border crossings.