michael kutschbach - calooh callay!

callooh callay! 2010

Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin

callooh callay developed over a year-long residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, during which I returned to a fully manual way of working. After several projects that depended on fabricators, this period became a deliberate recalibration: a commitment to small scale, to graphite and plaster, to framing and finishing everything myself. The project began with a renewed drawing practice, slow and process based, attentive to the way forms appear through the accumulation and removal of marks. Those drawings became propositions for objects, not as illustrations but as prompts asking what happens when a drawn form requires a body, a back, a side and a material presence in space.

The installation unfolded from that inquiry. Sculptures derived from the drawings were placed within an environment that borrowed something from museum display, with low light and small pockets of illumination that produced an atmosphere of careful attention, yet resisted the fixed qualities usually associated with artefacts. Wall drawings extended and unsettled the forms again, allowing them to slide between two and three dimensions. The space behaved as an ecosystem rather than a collection, with objects, drawings and spatial gestures circulating together, repeating and drifting as they tested out what they might become next.

callooh callay marked a return to intimacy in the studio, but also an expansion of it, an attempt to let the sensibility of drawing permeate the entire environment so that the installation itself felt in the midst of forming, thinking and recombining.

nubigene, 2010

144mm x 118mm ea. (322mm x 263mm framed)

"nubigene" is the title given to an ongoing series of drawings made with graphite on paper. The title is a reference to clouds or cloud-like forms. Each drawing begins with a layer of graphite dust resembling a cloud and evolves over time via drawing and erasure into various unforeseeable forms.

The following hoi polloi sculptures emerged as companions to the drawings in callooh callay, sharing their vocabulary while introducing a different kind of presence. Rather than translating drawings directly, the works operate as variations that test how a form behaves once it enters space. Each sculpture takes a single drawn proposition as a starting point and then diverges, allowing the material to determine its own drift and temperament.

Cast and recast in plaster, the forms accumulate as a loose family of objects, each one a small exercise in forming, or exercises in style in the spirit of Raymond Queneau. In the installation they sit among drawings and wall works not as resolved artefacts but as participants in a changing environment, shifting between states, repeating themselves, and quietly altering the terms of their own appearance.