Jack Hanley Gllery
945 Sun Mun Way
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Michael Sailstorfer
July 2 - August 2005
The Jack Hanley Gallery in Los Angeles is pleased to present an exhibition of work by the Munich-based artist Michael Sailstorfer.
The mutation of quotidian objects into their ironic opposites is at the core of Michael Sailstorfer's work. A police car is painstakingly crafted and made into a drum kit - thereby transforming a symbol of authority, and protection (and for some violence) into one of music (jazz, punk, rock?) and catharsis. Inverted meanings are revealed through recycling; creating a new item with a familiar feeling but a different function and form establishing an alternative conceptual economy. Playfully subverting the original, accepted notion of a situation or object and turning it upside down is the artist's objective. For if the use of irony 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.
Michael Sailstorfer lives and works in Munich, Germany, although at present he is on a residency in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited at the Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, Galerie Markus Richter in Berlin, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Attitudes in Geneva, Zero in Milan, the Barbican Centre in London, the Yokohama Trinnale, Japan in 2005 and the Biennale of Sydney in 2004.