Text

For Berlin Gallery Weekend 2026, Michael Sailstorfer conceived a large-scale, room-filling sculpture titled „Cumulus 2026“. The installation transforms the viewing room of Galerie Judin on Potsdamer Straße into a garage-like setting that references the brutalist industrial architecture of the building’s former printing hall.

„Cumulus 2026“ is composed of expansive clouds made of truck inner tubes that cover up the body of a sports car turning it into a black moving cloud. Characteristic of Sailstorfer’s practice, the work explores the interplay of volume, scale, surface, and materiality while engaging with the spatial conditions of the exhibition environment. As in the artist’s earlier work, an everyday object is recontextualized through unexpected material transformation.

The installation points to a key aspect of Sailstorfer’s practice: beneath its playful surface runs a distinctly Romantic sensibility. Revisiting the German tradition of the Sehnsuchtslandschaft—the landscape as a projection of longing and metaphysical inquiry—Sailstorfer reconfigures it through a lens of contemporary irony.