In spring 2002 art critic Anne Maier introduced the work of young Munich artist Michael Sailstorfer in one of her shows for the [basement] of the gallery. Ever since, his career has developed at a remarkable speed. For the sculpture D-IBRB, a tree house made from airplane parts, which throned above our stand at last year's Art Forum Berlin, he received the Christian Karl Schmidt Förderpreis für zeitgenössische Kunst. Shortly after he won another prize, the Leonhard-und-Ida-Wolf-Gedächtnispreis of the City of Munich and the Süddeutsche Zeitung elected him the promise of the year 2003 in the category visual arts. Endowed with a stipend of the ‚Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes' he will continue his studies this fall at ‚Goldsmith College' in London. Just before his move to England the gallery will open his first big one-person-show. Under the title Welttour (World Tour) the exhibition will present sculptures and video works from September 6th until October 18th. The exhibition will be accompanied by a small publication with a text by Mark Gisbourne.

"Acts of intervention, of deconstruction and reconstruction, are central to the sculptural works of Michael Sailstorfer. There is in his work a pre-disposed sense of the given, a given that is quite literally given over to something else. Whether it is a natural space in the forest given over to artifice (Waldputz, 2000), or an old police car turned into a set of drums (Schlagzeug, 2000), there is always for both the maker and object realised a defining instinct of self-consuming playfulness. Familiar utility is turned with humour to uselessness, or, put another way, into an aesthetic usefulness: meaning and function are thus transposed to a second use value. Sailstorfer's 'Froebeling' tendencies can just as easily turn a light aircraft into a tree-house (D-IBRB, 2002), as a city tourist bus into a non-utilitarian sculptural object (Dean & Marylou, 2003). A house consumes itself in a boiler (3 Ster mit Ausblick, 2002), caravans turn themselves into a house (Heimatlied, 2001), or a house becomes a piece of furniture (Herterichstrasse 119, 2001). Similarly, bus shelters can just as readily find themselves as newly domesticated spaces (Wohnen mit Verkehrsanbindung, 2001). In the mind and imaginary world of Sailstorfer the transitory suggests a variable permanence, and what appears to be permanent becomes transitory. Lampposts can become portable rockets that take off from launching pads (Sternschnuppe- Shooting Star, 2002), and street lamps need shades against the mosquitoes (Mückenhaus, 2001). For if the use of irony is that Socratean method by which we find the conveyance of new meaning, and in whose literal meaning is the opposite, then we have in Michael Sailstorfer a contemporary maker of playful ironic objects." (Mark Gisbourne)