Michael Schultz Gallery Berlin: Maik Wolf + Sonja Alhäuser

Maik Wolf. JoJoe Isonotom 

For many years, Maik Wolf has been a permanent member of Galerie Michael Schultz’s artists. Born in Pirna in 1964, he studied at the Hochschule für Kunst und Design in Halle and at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He lives and works in Berlin.

Maik Wolf remains true to his characteristic painting style: he piles up color, shapes and structures so far in and against each other that complex worlds arise; although based on realities, they are never actual views of landscapes.

The artist uses real source images from original photographic prototypes as a substrate on which his pictures grow, on which individual picture elements expand, but also grow apart, and flourish. There is a kind of optical whirling above the water, a constant becoming of the forms that suggest organic growth through technical elements. Stylistic quotes in the form of icons or speech bubble-like shapes from the world of games and graphic design expand the painterly repertoire.

In this new series, Maik Wolf has once again found further ways of interpreting landscape architecture, meanwhile reducing his typical captioning, comic-like symbols, and bringing surreal buildings to the forefront.

Wolf's title system for his paintings is highly complex, however extremely logical. Following the collage principle, analogous to the creation of his paintings, he combines word creations from various contents. His titles are freely associated with the respective image content; they strive to take up the order system within the series contextually.

The painterly role models, paired with quotations from computer-game aesthetics of virtual worlds, transform Maik Wolf's cosmos into Magical Realism.

Sonja Alhäuser. Top Transit

In her third solo exhibition with Michael Schultz, Sonja Alhäuser remains true to her well-known subject, but brings it to visualization in a completely new and different way than in her previous projects.After many years of researching the topic of food, of drawing related recipes, translating them into participatory installations, as well as lavish banquets, she now focuses more on the act of ingestion itself, and also examines the process of impact on human metabolism - whether alcohol and other intoxicants, or eucalyptus or St. John's wort tablets. With pleasure, we remember Sonja Alhäuser’s Food-Fest-Installation Maximelange at the gallery Michael Schultz in 2013, where all visitors to the vernissage were indulging on her buffet.

For the artist, born in Westerwald in 1969, transformation processes in the body are symbolic of processes in our life’s course; the microcosm of the body or the principle of the daily routine in transfer point to macrocosm and the whole path of life.
Feelings and sensations as insight into the human being are made visible in Alhäuser’s new pictorial drawings.
This sensitive, graphic observation of processes that take place within the body, but which in the large-format drawings also become independent in line whirls and color falls are bringing Alhäuser’s work to life - and the practical applicability of everything experienced and seen in their pictorial worlds. Everything flows, and you may bite in some things, too.

Sonja Alhäuser's works have received numerous awards and scholarships, including a project grant from the Künstlerdorf Schöppingen Foundation, the Förderpreis of Nothrhine-Westphalia, or, more recently, a working grant at the Villa Massimo in Rome.