Raum und Zeit

Although this young artist enjoys great international acclaim, his work has rarely been shown in Belgium. S.M.A.K. intends to change this. On the basis of about twenty works, the exhibition sketches a nuanced picture of Sailstorfer’s still young oeuvre. Sailstorfer is a melancholy dreamer who looks at the world with an inquisitive eye. By means of such traditional sculptural processes as transformation and decontextualisation, such familiar objects as car tyres, lamps and trees are turned into images whose value is purely aesthetic. Sailstorfer has an eye for the formal qualities of these objects, but he leaves room for fiction, imagination and the romantic too. The title of the exhibition refers to the two elements that shape our reality: time and space. As a sculptor, Sailstorfer tries to influence these elements. To achieve this he makes active use of the senses: light, smell and sound are transformed into workable, plastic materials.

Specially for this exhibition, for example, he has created Reaktor – Gent (2011), in which he examines how a monotonous sound fills space. Or else he looks at how the smell of popcorn can gradually pervade the museum. In this way he works out how sculptures occupy space, how they expand and transcend their own physical size. This is also the case with Zeit ist keine Autobahn (2005-2010), of which several versions have been assembled in a single room for the first time. Five car tyres revolve slowly against the wall and are thereby gradually worn down. The tyres make a quiet rubbing sound and fill the room with the smell of burnt rubber. This series can be seen as a metaphor for the ever-increasing need for our society to speed up – an acceleration that can only lead to self-destruction. Sailstorfer questions our need for continuous acceleration, our search for a private space and our modern idea of mobility, in playful images which idiosyncratically demand that time be stopped. Sailstorfer’s work presents us with a surprising and poetic view of the reality that surrounds us. Like a child who explores the world and tries to control it, Sailstorfer transforms everyday objects into aesthetic images that question man’s position in time and space. In the work Schwarzwald (2010-2011), for example, he shows us a natural scene deep in the forests at Düren in Germany. Here a 6-metre cube within which every twig, leaf and piece of moss has been painted black. A picture of the intervention is broadcast in the exhibition by live streaming. What interests the artist here is the transformation of the actual painted forest into its representation in a museum. As visitors to the exhibition we are no longer looking at reality, but at an abstraction of it. The limited perspective generates room for the imagination. Raum und Zeit shows a selection of works from the last ten years and includes installations, photos, videos and sculpture. From his earliest work, Waldzput (2000) through the 16mm film Lohma (2008) and the recent No Light and Wolken (both 2010), it becomes clear that nothing in this artist’s work maintains its familiar position.

Download here the exhibition leaflet about Michael Sailstorfer | Raum und Zeit: Michael Sailstorfer | Raum und Zeit (PDF)