Neville Wakefield

Michael Sailstorfer (b. Velden/Vils, Germany, 1979; lives and works in Berlin) is one of the most renowned German sculptors and object artists of his generation. His sculptural creations, which often require extensive planning and complex production processes, are the results of reflections on and reinterpretations of everyday objects: intriguing, bizarre, and sometimes humorous experimental arrangements and artifacts that interact with their environments, create spaces, or self-deconstruct. These transformative processes combine conceptual depth with poetic allure and tell stories of the passage of time and disintegration. Many of Sailstorfer's installations depend on the beholder's active engagement for their effect. He typically documents his sculptural experiments with the camera and later shares them with the public in the form of videos or photographs. The extensive monograph MS 00 22 presents the most important works from Sailstorfer's creative career. Formally diverse writings and conversations with the artist offer profound insight into his practice.

This publication coincides with the debut museum exhibition of this Venezuelan-born, New York-based artist, whose work explores our psychological relationship to visual narrative tropes. In his collages, photographs, sculptures and site-specific murals, Herrera employs figurative and spatial elements of cartoon and animated imagery to produce enigmatic associations that are at once profound and playful. Freudian bulges and folds are candy-coated in his Disney-stylized wall paintings, while in highly textural photographs the body and the landscape are revealed to be still, cryogenically frozen fields of the unknown. In addition to the superb photographic reproductions of Herrera's work from his 1998 exhibition at The Renaissance Society, this catalogue includes essays by Neville Wakefield, who considers the delightful and provocative subject matter of Herrera's work, and Maria Tatar, who explores the fabulous monsters lurking in his coloring book collages.