DUBAI.- This is the kind of ride you take Saturday afternoon, weary from the night before, where everything seems to be going wrong. The video you’re recording is upside down (Welttour, 2003), the steering wheel isn’t turning the way it should (Lenkrad, 2012)… this journey seems like one giant endless maze-like track (Maze, 2012-13). The absurdity is laughable. But at least your partner-in-crime is entertaining you with song (Welttour).

Michael Sailstorfer’s wabi-sabi1 aesthetic often deals with space, motion and how we function in the world. He is resourceful: he utilizes the day-to-day, decrepit, oft overlooked functional objects as his materials. He is also naughty: he decontextualizes these materials, reassigning them physical qualities that simultaneously incite wonderment and fear while keeping the palette of decay in the shiny new-ness of his incarnations. Sailstorfer uses his mind through his hands (a tendency since his childhood), deconstructing, tinkering, reassembling with a youthful curiosity, “what happens if…” The results are playful, pure in form… but functionally useless. Yet their wabi-sabi nature does not take away from the works, rather, it reinforces the poetry within the purity (albeit mischievousness) of his latest exhibition, Try to reach the goal without touching the walls.

This may be a game with Sailstorfer egging us on, but this is serious play. Michael Sailstorfer will be making his debut solo exhibition in Dubai exclusively at Carbon 12 Dubai.

Berlin-based German artist (b. 1979) active since 2001. Sailstorfer is represented by multiple international galleries and exhibits in the Americas and heavily across Europe, with works in private and public collections including the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Sammlung Goetz (Munich), and S.M.A.K. (Gent).



1 Japanese aesthetic philosophy of beauty with the acceptance that nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect in the natural cycle of growth, decay and death.