We are delighted to open this season with a duo exhibition by the German artists Michael Sailstorfer and Johannes Wohnseifer. The artists have been part of solo exhibitions and group exhibitions at Gallery K be-fore, ‘Head & Shoulders’ is their first together. They work respectively with sculpture and painting; and all included artworks were completed in 2016.
In an email exchange with the artists, Sailstorfer's mask-sculptures are defined as the "head" of the title, and Wohnseifer's paintings, as its “shoulders". Wohnseifer offers a playful reflection on the assembly: "Every head contains a skull. The symbol for mortality and death. Maybe as a reaction to Michael's heads/masks, a lot of my works for the show have a relation to death, but not in a morbid sense. It's more about the aspect of death as an act of transformation".
Transformation also runs throughout Sailstorfer's work. Sailstorfer expands the material usage from beyond its frozen, functional destiny to a pliable, new functionality. Thus new stories are possible while the sculp-tures have an innate relation to the society, which created the materials it is made from. In Kopf und Körper and in the series, M.49, M.50, M.51, we see the remains of the process. An architectural model acquires mask-like qualities when it is mounted vertically on the wall or rested upon racks at human-proportioned head height. Packaging materials such as cardboard and tape, whose task is to protect sculptures and merchandise during shipping, have been transformed into sculptures. They are shaped like models of pos-sible architecture and casted in commonly used metals like aluminium and in concrete, and covered with gold (a good conductor), or painted to appear as their origin. Traces from their manufacture are visible on the "skin" of the masks.
From the head and down to the shoulders, Wohnseifer presents a selection from several ongoing series. In his paintings, he interrogates the mythologies of our every-day and our shared world of media symbols. In the new series Helmut Lang (I - VII) label tags from the prestigious fashion house accumulate. A new tag is added per image, on the following motif the same tags are printed out, plus one. A collector's acceleration towards the must-have-all drive. In addition, a new K-painting (Kawasaki 1977) is presented. The series are based on the examination of the 'K' in the gallery's name, an investigation Wohnseifer embarked on starting with his first exhibition at Gallery K in 2006. The transformation he mentions above is evident in the text im-ages. In I dreamed, a sentence is repeated and parts of it covered. The meaning of the sentence changes with the shifting movement of covering/uncovering across the canvas. In Colony Collapse Disorder, the words 'MONEY', 'HONEY', 'LOTSOF', are inserted in a language game with destruction and change circuit-ing the situation of the bees. The words emerge crisply from a strong, coloristic visual field, built from pat-terned fabrics, canvas and felt, etched with a laser marking technique. This potential for destructive infor-mation loss is also involved in his Polaroid Painting. Here, the artists grants a painted depiction of the chem-ical response in the moment of development of Polaroid film.
Michael Sailstorfer (*1979) lives and works in Berlin. His works have been seen at venues including MoMA PS1, New York; the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Garage, Moskva; Hayward Gallery, London; S.M.A.K, Ghent; the Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover and the Momentum Biennale, Moss 2006. Works by Sail-storfer are part of prominent collections, such as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Steve Cohen, New York; Boros Collection, Berlin; MUSEION – Museum of modern and contemporary art Bolzano and Walker Art Center. Sailstorfer received OCA, Oslo, International Studio Program in 2006.
Johannes Wohnseifer (*1967) lives and works in Cologne. His recent exhibitions include (un)möglich at MARTa Herford; Individual Stories at Kunsthalle Wien; Hara Museum, Tokyo; Sprengel Muse-um, Hanover; Städel Museum, Frankfurt and All the World's A Stage at Götz Collection, Munich. Works by Wohnseifer are part of prominent collections, such as Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Boros Collection, Berlin; Harald Falckenberg, Hamburg; Sammlung Goetz, Munich and Sammlung Schürmann, Berlin.
