Artists

Michail Pirgelis

Press release

The exhibition “Hawaiian Hills” presents Michail Pirgelis’s latest body of work as a site specific spatial installation extending across our two floors. The works are made from original airplane parts featuring red and white stripes, abstracted fragments of flags. Through cropping and surface treatment, the artist intervenes to varying degrees in the design of the found material. Conceptually and serially conceived, the works recall abstract paintings of Minimal Art through their red stripes on a white ground and their consistent format. In contrast, the title “Hawaiian Hills” opens up a space of longing that seems to stand in opposition to the conceptual working method.

Pirgelis presents these identically sized works on a specially developed, autonomous and free standing exhibition display. This creates a permeable body in space that measures and occupies it, while at the same time emphasizing the sculptural quality of both the individual works and the spatial installation as a whole. The reverse sides of the panels remain partially visible, bringing the works into focus as three dimensional objects that oscillate between image, relief, and sculpture. The artist thus concentrates primarily on the serial and sculptural aspects of his site specific installation, while simultaneously opening up various fields of reference, among them through the suggestive title “Hawaiian Hills”. His work activates the conventions of Post Minimalism and Conceptual Art, while also questioning them, and within the freedom of an independent art space enables an experimental shifting of the boundaries between installation, sculpture, and painting.

Within the exhibition history of Kunstraum München, Pirgelis also connects to the early exhibitions of US American artists such as Richard Tuttle, Fred Sandback, Agnes Martin, or Robert Ryman at the Kunstraum in the 1970s. This can be read as an additional site specific anchoring and a contemporary development of these early concepts.

The exhibition is curated by Friederike Schuler.