MICHAEL SAILSTORFER - echo current
„Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln
Und die anderen sind im Licht.
Und man siehet die im Lichte
Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.“
“For some are in the darkness
And the others are in light.
And you see the ones in brightness,
Those in darkness drop from sight.”
Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, Act II, Scene 5
Bertolt Brecht’s lines from The Threepenny Opera echo through the space once more, this time in an exhibition that reflects upon and extends the dialogue initiated by the previous collaboration between Michael Sailstorfer and Saskia Diez. While DOUBLE TAKE explored notions of deception, materiality, and impermanence through wearable art, this exhibition returns these ideas to the realm of objects—foregrounding the transformation of the everyday, and the shifting values of material and meaning.
Sailstorfer continues his engagement with light and darkness: a pulsating Morse code flickers rhythmically across walls and floors, while cast bronze light bulbs, suspended like silent remnants of a string of lights, hover in space. Their original function has been suspended; they no longer illuminate but instead stand frozen as pure form. No Light renders the ephemeral permanent, preserving the familiar while simultaneously stripping it of its purpose.
This dialectic between value and devaluation, permanence and transience, runs throughout the exhibition. The work Maske takes an everyday material—cardboard boxes—and recasts it in bronze. Traces of tape, labels, and shipping stickers remain imprinted on the fragile surfaces, preserving a fleeting moment in an object’s passage through the global flow of goods. These shipping boxes, once mere containers, are transformed into artifacts. Their metamorphosis recalls the jewelry pieces of DOUBLE TAKE, in which a found stone is cast in silver, only to gradually lose its surface through wear, revealing its true materiality over time.
A similar principle underlies Blei Painting, in which heavy lead serves as a pictorial surface—a material that alters over time, oxidizing and undergoing chemical transformation. Yet here, its surface is overlaid with makeup: shimmering eyeshadow from Chanel, MAC, or Dior, dark pigmented eyeliner. The luxurious masks the raw, the fleeting conceals the enduring. And yet, as with the silver stones in DOUBLE TAKE, nothing lasts forever—touch and time cause the makeup to fade, layers dissolve, revealing what lies beneath.
Themes of movement, transformation, and process extend into Maze, a labyrinth whose structures are etched into the surface through acid—pathways that only become visible through dissolution, through the removal of material. Much like the stone Sailstorfer collects on his travels to cast in silver, or the shipping boxes freed from their utilitarian role and cast in bronze, this work speaks to material metamorphosis and the inherent impermanence of any surface.
In the juxtaposition of these works, a quiet, almost meditative tension emerges: the exhibition oscillates between the fleeting and the permanent, between the mundane and the art object. The flickering Morse light bathes the room in alternating brightness and shadow—a rhythm that extends the question of visibility and invisibility. As in Brecht’s verses, some things remain concealed, while others are briefly illuminated, only to disappear once more.
