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Michail Pirgelis, Opaque Surfaces, Installation view, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, July 2–August 27, 2022
© Michail Pirgelis, Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Photo: Timo Ohler
~ Preface ~
In Greek mythology, Icarus is the son of Daedalus, an artist and architect. Daedalus was commissioned by King Minos to build a Labyrinth on the island of Crete. The Labyrinth was so big and intricate because it had to imprison the Minotaur, the monstrous son of Minos. After completing his work, Daedalus and Icarus were also imprisoned by Minos in the same Labyrinth. They could not leave the island because they must not reveal the secret of the Labyrinth to anyone. Daedalus, however, does not give up to his freedom in the face of the ban of Minos and decides to escape. So, he built huge wings that were glued with wax to his arms and back and Icarus’. Father and son soar over the sea but Icarus is a curious and naive child. He gets caught up in the thrill of flying and wants to touch the sun. But the higher he rises, the more the heat of the brightest star melts the wax, causing him to fall into the sea where he drowns at the mercy of the waves. Daedalus manages to reach another island, Sicily, where he built a temple dedicated to Phoebus Apollo, the God of Art, in honor of his son.
Michail Pirgelis, Opaque Surfaces, Installation view, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, July 2–August 27, 2022
© Michail Pirgelis, Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Photo: Timo Ohler
The myth of Daedalus and Icarus has always been associated with an idealised image of art and the role of the artist. In fact, this myth sums up various concepts, with both positive and negative connotations, such as: the sacrifice of life for the purity of art, the boundless and irrational ambition of the artist, creativity as an extreme resource to get out of difficulties, the artist's challenge against the rules imposed by society, the fear of daring to fly high and its opposite, Hubris or Arrogance, which will lead to the inevitable fall into mediocrity.
The topic of Icarus, Daedalus and the fall of the Hubris is the common thread running through the artistic practice of Michail Pirgelis, a German artist (1976), who grew up in Xanthi in Greece. The artist grafted the myth into his practice, manipulating elements that belong to the ancient classical tradition together with the dialectic of postmodern art, in a sort of demystification of the modernist ideal through points of conceptual sarcasm.
The process of transforming the surfaces is at the origin of his work. For a long time, the artist collects metal panels, which belong to the carcasses of abandoned airplanes in the Mojave desert; he disassembles and reassembles them and then he manipulates them.
In the solo exhibition “Opaque Surfaces” (July 2 - August 27, 2022) in the Berlin location
of the Sprüth Magers, Michail Pirgelis shows a series of new artworks that look at
“ special surface structures, traces and patina as well as the history of the individual elements.
My main concern is the abstraction of the material and the transfer to another level."
Pirgelis explains in a text produced on the occasion of the exhibition.
On display, the artist presents two groups of works of large dimensions that intervene
on to the gallery space by responding to its internal structure. The first group of works
consists of panels both set up independently as monochrome sculptures, lying in front of
a wall or hung up from the ceiling.
These works, like Desert Star I and Desert Star II, consist of rectangular floor sections of the
plane passenger area, held together by metal reinforcements and scraps of adhesive.
The vertical structure and seriality of the works clearly evoke the American
minimalism and in particular Barnett Newman's zip paintings.
The intrusive reference to minimalism in Pirgelis works, as the title of the exhibition
“Opaque Surfaces” makes clear, it is described in the preface to the catalog by Tenzig Barshee,
"In his essay “Opaque Surfaces” (1973), Douglas Crimp analyzed how the art of Robert Ryman,
Agnes Martin and others attempted to reconcile this issue ( “Can painting ever
achieve a “literalness”similar to “to what Minimalism had imparted to sculptural object?”).
He described these works as opaque paintings. In their pragmatic approach, these artists
responded to real parameters. Instead of elsewhere, their works recorded what was already
there: the present condition".
In Pirgelis’ practice this translates into an attention to procedure as a transformative power of art.
The works on display, which at first glance give an idea of perfection and sleek surfaces,
are actually the result of a careful manipulation by the artist who works on the elements
already deteriorated by time on old abandoned carcasses. But this clarity is not achieved by
extracting the elements, but by slowly extracting what remains under the surface:
"They were objects just waiting to be uncovered." Pirgelis says.
Michail Pirgelis, Phantom Hands I , 2021, Aluminium, titanium, lacquer, 96 Å~ 150 Å~ 5 cm, 37 7/8 Å~ 59 Å~ 2 inches
© Michail Pirgelis, Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Photo: Ben Hermanni
In works such as, Nature Studies and Phantom Hands, the pictorial quality stands out
while other works show more clearly Pirgelis Intervention who works to extract
bare aluminum, as in Opaque Surface and Desert Training.
The artist blurs the boundary between genres, exposing the industrial material
translated in forms between image and sculpture, that evoke the minimalist
Donald Judd and Robert Morris.
More than an abstraction it looks like an extraction by scraping of reality.
Michail Pirgelis, Italian Denim II, 2021, Aluminium, titanium, lacquer, 81.5 Å~ 53 Å~ 4.5 cm, 32 Å~ 20 7/8 Å~ 1 3/4 inches
© Michail Pirgelis, Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Photo: Ben Hermanni
“Pirgelis is interested in the way technology simultaneously defines and limits
human perspective. He finds an abstract language for what Auge’
(The Future, 2015) deems the ultimate symbolic act - a person’s ability to
situate themselves in the world - but seems to posit the limitations themselves
or the experience of reckoning with these constraints as itself
what is most essential here. Standing before Pirgelis’ swathes of metal,
there is a sense in which these remnants are about as apt a language as
there is to evoke that redefined essence of humanity that has been altered by
what it has made”, Camilla McHugh writes in the catalog, investigating
how the legacy of Land Art and conceptual art of the 1960s influenced
Pirgelis' practice. And indeed his installations seem to retain some
of the evocative power of Land and Process Art sculptures albeit within interior space.
In her clear textMcHugh also quotes Walter Benjamin's Angelus Novus
in relation to the material of Pirgelis's works, the carcasses of airplanes and the
reuse he makes of them. In Benjamin, the Angel of History looks at
the remains of the past because he wants to recompose them into a unity.
But a violent wind, the wind of progress, propels him with his back towards the future.
Michail Pirgelis, Desert Training I, 2021, Aluminium, titanium, lacquer, silicone, 86 Å~ 53 Å~ 5 cm, 33 7/8 Å~ 20 7/8 Å~ 2 inches
© Michail Pirgelis, Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Photo: Ben Hermanni
Nicolas Schafhausen scrive del suo lavoro in catalogo “ (...) he employs
his perception as an occupation of time, as a way of absorbing
and conveying impressions. As an artist one is left alone in having to
invent one’s own visual world in order to reach inner truths. Within this in mind,
Pirgelis' sculptures bring to light his unexpected, hidden and instinctive feelings for him.
And whilst his outer and inner thruts of him remain ostensibly related to one another,
they yet remain parallel according to their own laws. The amorphous material
transport notions of time, of becoming and passing”.
Michail Pirgelis studied at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf with
Rosmarie Troeckl (2003-2009), he exhibited at the Braunsfelder collection,
Cologne (2019), with Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt); Leopold-Hoesch Museum, Dueren
(2016, with David Ostrowski); In addition, he has participated in several group exhibitions
including a.o. Villa Sarre, Potsdam and byvier, Cologne (both 2021); Forum Ludwig,
Cologne (2020); Athens Biennial, (suits 2018); Rubell family collection, Miami (2015);
Istanbul Modern (2014), Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (2013); Thessaloniki Biennial (2011),
Kunstmuseum Bonn (2010) and Stadtmuseum Dusseldorf (2005). Pirgelis was selected
for the DESTE Award, Athens and 5 × 5, Castelló (both 2013). Numerous awards
and scholarships include the Akademie der Künste Berlin Scholarship, Berlin (2013),
the Audi Art Award for "New Positions" at Art Cologne (2010), the Adolf Loos Award
from the Van den Valentyn Foundation , Cologne (his first award ever, in 2008) and
Villa Romana Prize, Florence (2007).
As in a postmodern version of the myth, Pirgelis' artworks at Opaque Surfaces
could be compared to the great wings of Daedalus and Icarus. Nostalgia is the secret element
that holds them together as a magic word that revives finite things to free them from the past.
Contrary to Greek mythology, however, Icarus loses his ingenuity and does not sacrifice
himself for the purity of art. His desire to reach the stars, of being perfect, absolute and
hyperreal, has transformed a chimerical abstraction, the myth of modernist perfection,
by overturning it; only by using flaked elements of a past reality it is possible to create wings
that do not melt like wax in the sun, do not flake in an endless transformation towards the future.
Michail Pirgelis, Nature Study III, 2021, Aluminium, titanium, lacquer, 67 Å~ 74.5 Å~ 4 cm, 26 3/8 Å~ 29 1/4 Å~ 1 5/8 inches
© Michail Pirgelis, Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Photo: Ben Hermanni
Michail Pirgelis, Opaque Surfaces, July 2 – August 27, 2022, Sprüth Magers, Berlin
Exhibition Catalog: Michail Pirgelis. Opaque Surfaces, WALTHER KONIG, 2021
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