Michel Sauer: erzählen

It begins in one language

"Things and images each tell a story in their own form. It begins in a language of seeing that touches the mind and the senses in order to branch out from there. A connection is created that encompasses what the viewer invents. While the present and the remembered reflect the apparently inexplicable, a picture of individual perception emerges. A narrative continues to grow, fuelled by small visual peculiarities and unheard-of observations." This is what Michel Sauer himself writes about his work. The artist, born in 1949, studied in Karlsruhe under Horst Antes and Emil Schumacher, received the Junger Westen art prize in 1972, was awarded a Villa Massimo scholarship in 1980, was honoured with the Villa Romana Prize in 1994 and subsequently taught at the University of Siegen from 1994 to 2014. This volume presents an overview of his work from the 1970s to 2022 and, according to the editor Eva Schmidt, it is the sculptural work that is at the centre of the artist's interest. Michel Sauer has always viewed his sculptural work as an abstract perception of a combination of improvisation and manual exploration of the materials wood, zinc, copper and brass. This has inspired him in his search for the unity of images of imagination and memory - a unity that is realised in the medial interplay of poetry and its always possible "materialisation".

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