At one of the tables, our attention gets drawn toward a sculpture reminiscent of a brain. “I loosely see my work as a diary. Each sculpture captures a snapshot that reflects my emotions or describes where I currently stand in the world,” Sailstorfer tells us as we ask him about the object. “When creating this series around brains, I was thinking about those restless nights when we lay awake, clinging onto a thought as it winds itself through our minds,” he continues. The sculpture’s material, a dense rope made of various little strings intertwined with each other, alludes to the intricate nature of our thoughts. “I then wanted to add some weight to the sculptures, which is why I decided to cast the brains in ceramic,” he adds, pointing towards three of his “Atomic Brain” sculptures across the room.
The choice of specific materials is vital in Michael Sailstorfer’s work. By decontextualizing and reconstructing daily objects in unexpected ways, he detaches them from their assigned meanings and gives them a life of their own. This approach creates new conversations and allows the supposedly known to transcend its original purpose.
A beautiful example of how Sailstorfer gives new meaning to everyday materials is his sculpture “Salt,” a work his team unpacked for us from one of the many wooden crates piled up in the back of the studio. The tear-shaped sculpture is carved from salt stone and forms part of a larger group of works Sailstorfer created on the theme of sadness. While salt stone is a medium that has been incorporated into various projects over the past few years, this particular sculpture was created for an exhibition at Perrotin in New York in 2019. There, it was presented alongside a live stream showing three identical tears on the Norwegian coastline. The video captured how the coast’s rough wind and crashing waves gradually dissolved the sculptures, causing the tears to slowly disappear and the salt to return to its original state throughout the exhibition.