If not now, when?
Group Exhibition
Museum Beelden aan Zee, Den Haag
Through September 8, 2024

If not now, when? presents an international selection of over seventy sculptures and installations from the collection of art collector Max Vorst. The exhibition gives an impressive overview on the developments in contemporary sculpture in the twenty-first century and demonstrates the diversity, originality and high quality of one of the most important private art collections in The Netherlands, and it connects themes such as the contemporary image of the human form, abstraction, rhythm and construction while also showing the blurring of time.

Mondi Possibili
Henni Alftan, John Baldessari, Cao Fei, Thomas Demand, Thea Djordjadze, Lucy Dodd, Robert Elfgen, Peter Fischli  David Weiss, Sylvie Fleury, Jenny Holzer, Donald Judd, Karen Kilimnik, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, David Ostrowski, Michail Pirgelis, Sterling Ruby, Thomas Scheibitz, Andreas Schulze, Hyun-Sook Song, Robert Therrien, Rosemarie Trockel, Kaari Upson, Andrea Zittel
August 31–September 14, 2023
Seoul

Mondi Possibili highlights the interplay between art and design and explores the many ways in which experimentation with material, technique and scale can reveal the hidden narratives, quiet drama and humor in the everyday items that furnish our lives as well as our imaginations. Connected through a paradigm of the possible, all artworks on show examine familiar objects – citing, celebrating, adapting or appropriating them – offering surprising, playful or unsettling approaches that open up a range of “possible worlds.” This will be the fourth edition of Sprüth Magers’ Mondi Possibili – first titled by Pasquale Leccese – showcasing significant themes in the selected artists’ works as well as the gallery’s longstanding heritage. Its three previous iterations were presented in 1989, 2006 and 2007 in Cologne, where the gallery’s history is firmly rooted, and art and design have intersected for many decades.

Michail Pirgelis
Opaque Surfaces
July 2–August 20, 2022
Berlin

Michail Pirgelis' solo exhibition Opaque Surfaces presents new and previously unseen works that highlight his complex approach on sculpture. In his practice, the artist discusses different forms and expressions of sculpture by creating aesthetic surfaces with obvious painterly references, using material of decommissioned airplanes. Exploring the limits of our understanding of objects, Pirgelis' work radically expands and abstracts our experience of the sculptural. 

Michail Pirgelis, David Ostrowski
Nothing Happened
November 15–December 23, 2016
Los Angeles

Art knows no zero point. It has no concept of an outside place, no indefinite expression; it is impossible to represent 'nothing'. French cultural theorist Roland Barthes was the first to point this out. According to Barthes, every work carries with it the illusions of the culture in which it was made. The mesh of everyday myths is unavoidable; art history’s thicket of codes impenetrable. But for all its impossibility, the desire for this kind of zero point, the yearning to see without codes and connotations, remains essential. We all long for it. Astonishingly, the works of young Cologne artists Michail Pirgelis and David Ostrowski diligently strive toward this precise way of seeing.

Michail Pirgelis
Los Angeles
April 6–May 7, 2011
London

Since 2003, Pirgelis has made frequent visits to the ‘boneyards’ of Arizona and California, the now legendary resting places and holding facilities of scores of obsolete aircraft and flight-related paraphernalia. The planes either await re-deployment or are stripped piece-by-piece of their highly valuable parts which are incorporated back into other still viable vessels, with some craft remaining little more than carcasses. Pirgelis’ sculptures are often carefully hybridised amalgams of these incongruous aircraft remnants.

Accrochage Zeichungen
George Condo, Axel Kasseböhmer, Frances Scholz, Andreas Schulze, Marie Luise Lebschik, Michail Pirgelis
September 12–October 14, 2006
Cologne

Mondi Possibili
Thea Djordjadze, Peter Fischli  David Weiss, Claus Föttinger, Thomas Grünfeld, Jenny Holzer, Stefan Kern, Joseph Kosuth, Louise Lawler, Michail Pirgelis, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Thomas Scheibitz, Andreas Schulze, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Franz West
January 17–April 7, 2006
Cologne

As part of the PASSAGEN, the supporting programme of the International Furniture Fair in Cologne, at the beginning of the year Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers present a new edition of the exhibition “Mondi Possibili”. The works on display deal with the subject of furniture from a variety of angles: as citation, as homage, as adaptation, or as copy. Others are usable objects that hardly differ from their reference objects in the domain of design or furniture.