Michel Sauererzählen

“Things and images each narrate in their own form. It begins in a language of seeing that touches the mind and the senses in order to branch out there. A connection arises that encompasses whatever contemplation invents. While the present and the remembered reflect the apparently inexplicable, an image of individual perception emerges. A narrative grows ever further, fed by small visual idiosyncrasies and unheard-of observations.” This is what Michel Sauer himself writes about his works. The artist, born in 1949, studied in Karlsruhe under Horst Antes and Emil Schumacher, received the Kunstpreis Junger Westen in 1972, was a fellow of the Villa Massimo in 1980, was awarded the Villa Romana Prize in 1994 and subsequently taught at the Universität Siegen from 1994 to 2014. The present volume offers an overview of his output from the 1970s to 2022. It is, so the editor Eva Schmidt writes, the sculptural work that stands at the centre of the artist’s interest. Michel Sauer has always regarded his sculptural work as an abstracting perception of a connection between improvisation and a craftsmanly engagement with the materials wood, zinc, copper and brass. This has spurred him on in his search for the unity of images of the imagination and of memory – a unity that is realised in the medial interplay of poetry and its ever-possible “materialisation.”

Exhibition:
annex14, Zurich, 24/2 – 1/4/2023