KNOTEN WIE WOLKEN - Michael Sailstorfer
Description
When does something condense, and when does it dissolve? Where does the boundary lie between binding and release? In KNOTEN WIE WOLKEN, Michael Sailstorfer explores transitions through materials that relinquish their status as objects in order to participate, of their own accord, in the becoming of the world.
Michael Sailstorfer is among the most significant German sculptors and installation artists of his generation. He is known for his subtle and incisive engagement with time and transformation. In his works, things are freed from their functional purpose to unfold within new contexts.
His sculptures and installations hover in a state of semantic suspension. They are hybrid entities, shapeshifters in continuous metamorphosis, defying the Apollonian ideal of the perfected form.
HEAVY CLOUDS forms the heart of the exhibition. Sailstorfer has painted clouds in oil onto rolled lead. This industrial material is typically used in roofing, sealing buildings against the elements. To this day, it rests atop historic roofs, repelling what descends from the sky—rain, snow, cold.
Within this lies a poetic gesture: the material designed to shield against weather becomes a canvas for clouds. What was once repelled is now invited in. The boundary becomes permeable. The lead asserts itself. It oxidizes, reacts with the air, forms bonds with the paint. It generates its own weather. Its own atmosphere.
“The material speaks along,” Sailstorfer notes. In this co-articulation lies a deeper insight: matter is not passive. It is not merely the vehicle of human form, but possesses its own agency, which is constantly in a process of dissolution and renewal. We are not mere observers; we are entangled within it. As philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad writes: “We are not outside the world we observe, but part of the world in its dynamic configuration.”
What lives decays and wears away, only to re-create itself anew. Lead—often perceived as heavy, toxic, burdensome—sheds its familiar associations. It interacts with the seemingly light clouds. Both are transformed. They emerge from the encounter altered, no longer what they once were. Is this not the essence of encounter itself?
Then, a knot. The sculpture SHAKE HANDS. A handshake rendered as rope, cast in bronze, coated in fluorescent and luminous paint. “Shake Hands Bend” is what sailors call
a knot that joins two ropes together. In Sailstorfer’s work, more than a functional connection emerges: a subtle meditation on binding and release.
The anthropologist Tim Ingold writes that the knot is never an end. It is a liminal form, marking a threshold state. It recalls its own making—the tying of a loop—while always retaining the possibility of being undone. In seafaring, the untying of a knot releases energy. Moreover, the knot produces trailing ends that reach outward, seeking new connections. It is less a conclusion than a prospect. The discovery of other ends to which one might newly bind.
SHAKE HANDS adds another dimension to this openness: the fluorescent paint transforms the bronze sculpture into a reservoir of energy. The material absorbs light and releases it again in darkness. An ephemeral process that borders on the magical.
Sailstorfer turns the performativity of the knot into an enigmatic visual paradox. On the one hand, he shows that entanglement is not an absolute end. On the other, it makes one wonder: what holds a bond in place and what sets it free?
WOLKEN LANDSHUT is a large-scale spatial installation. Using rubber hoses from tractor tires, as found in agricultural supply, Sailstorfer has formed clouds and filled them with air. The grey hoses, normally subjected to heavy loads and constant contact with the ground, become light, hovering formations.
Impressions arise: a Berlin winter, those days when the sky hangs so low one feels it could be touched. A leaden sky.
And here, the transformation: clouds of rubber that both absorb and counteract this heaviness. What was heavy appears weightless. What is below may rise above. The clouds hang in space like a mobile, altering it—not only by filling it, but by rendering it legible in new ways. Sailstorfer demonstrates with virtuosity how deeply our perception is shaped by materiality and how easily that perception may shift.
EINFACHER STROMKREIS BLAU—a work composed of mouth-blown, hand-formed neon tubes, bent into the shape of a mask derived from the schematic diagram of an electrical circuit.
Current flows through the closed circuit. The tubes glow blue. What was previously invisible, the energy, becomes visible. The abstract turns concrete. The schematic becomes corporeal, and a face begins to emerge. A spark of identity flickers into being.
The mask—who wears it? What lies behind it? Is it energy itself that takes on a face? Is it the material? Or is it the viewer, recognizing themselves in their anthropomorphic ordering of the world?
What unites all these works is their ambivalent play with states of transformation. Sailstorfer does not create finished objects, but generative processes, working with materials that are themselves in flux.
In this understanding, matter is never fixed. It is radically open. Capable of response, of resonance, of receptivity.
Sailstorfer dissolves seemingly clear distinctions—between solid and ephemeral, heavy and light, natural and artificial—in favor of a third state: a condition of suspension in which anything becomes possible. That which has not yet fully declared itself, that which eludes fixation, may still become anything. It opens spaces for imagination.
In the end, Michael Sailstorfer expands the parliament of the living to include the agency of matter itself. He invites us to open our eyes to the hidden processes that are constantly at work. For it is precisely within these processes that the potential for transformation lies.
Text: Frank Steinhofer
