Meet the artist: Michail Michailov

MICHAIL MICHAILOV
on the other side

MEET THE ARTIST
28.4.2023, 17-20 Uhr

Liquid leaks, it splashes, it drips, it spills. Mostly unintentionally. It penetrates porous material, the fat content in it connects with its new carrier, stubbornly settles on and in it. As a result, the stain can hardly be separated from the substance in which it now permanently resides. How is a grease stain formed? Michail Michailov makes a subject out of the unintentional, the disturbing, even the undesirable. Using colored pencils and a certain obsession, he draws in a meticulous process what is usually not there and must be avoided at all costs, especially in the context of art. Stains are the reason for the white gloves worn by all those who deal with valuable originals in museums and other (art) institutions. They should prevent the body fat on the hands from sticking to the surfaces of the works of art, the documents or the rare artefacts…

There is a good chance that hurried exhibition visitors will miss the drawing as they turn their attention to the artist’s more expansive interventions. Something similar happens on the ground. Michail Michailov has turned over several of the floor tiles. The backs of the otherwise anthracite-colored elements shine silvery and, despite their robustness, bring back memories of shimmering water surfaces in summer…

Michail Michailov’s examination of body and space goes beyond the preoccupation with the relationship between figure and ground, between a form and its environment, which is always virulent in art, and takes a turn towards fundamental questions about being human as well as its conditions and possibilities. The artist traces these existential themes using drawings, videos and performances, staging the diverse variants of his “self” in installations related to the respective exhibition space. His precise yet humorous gaze includes the microcosm of the dust that has accumulated in his artist’s studio as well as the landscapes in which he moves. Michailov’s artistic practice reads like a constant attempt to reflect the big in the small and, conversely, to discover the small in the big as a pattern. He repeatedly tests the architecture and urban infrastructure that surrounds him. The places he visits often have something remote. You can see, for example, deposits on the backs of buildings or natural spaces used by people and, only relatively small, as one element among many, the artist. The colors, the materiality, the patterns and the formal conditions of the natural or urban landscapes in which Michailov inscribes himself with ever new configurations of the body attest to the existence of the artist at the same time as they make his body disappear…

The exhibition on the other side gives visitors an insight into the artistic strategies that Michail Michailov has developed over the years. The figure of the artist in relation to the exhibition situation can be interpreted as an example of human existence in general. Because Michailov does not stage himself as a heroic subject who asserts himself against his environment or even at their expense, but as someone who integrates existing structures and starts processes of comparison and adjustment, in which he existing moments of oneself-with-the-environment -Connecting imitates and helps to form your own.

(Using a text on the occasion of Michail Michailov’s exhibition On the other side at Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt)

Michail Michailov participated 2022 in the 59th Venice Biennale representing BULGARIA.
Michail Michailov lives in Vienna and Paris.