Michail Pirgelis
HYLE
Kunstraum Dornbirn
July 3–November 8, 2026
Public Reception: July 2, from 7pm
Artist Talk: July 3, 2pm

With HYLE, Kunstraum Dornbirn presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Austria by Michail Pirgelis. For more than two decades, the artist has worked with materials from decommissioned passenger aircraft, including fuselage panels, window sections, and floor elements. Through processes of stripping, grinding, and fragmentation, he detaches these materials from their original function and transforms them into abstract sculptures. The exhibition title refers to the Aristotelian concept of hyle (ὕλη): matter in relation to form—the potential of material to assume shape. In doing so, it identifies the conceptual core of Pirgelis’s artistic practice.

10 Years LA!
May 15–August 8, 2026
Los Angeles

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present 10 Years LA!, an exhibition celebrating the gallery’s decade-long presence in Los Angeles. Since opening its doors in February 2016, the gallery has featured solo and group exhibitions debuting new works by its iconic LA-based artists as well as major installations by artists from around the world, often bringing their work to the city for the very first time. Illustrating this expansive approach, 10 Years LA! fills not only the 10,000 square feet of the gallery at 5900 Wilshire Boulevard with works by a wide cross-section of Sprüth Magers artists, but also extends to the former Sizzler restaurant at 6145 Wilshire with an installation focusing on film and video.

10 Years LA! features the work of, among others, Kenneth Anger, Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Gretchen Bender, Cao Fei, George Condo, Hanne Darboven, Thomas Demand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Thea Djordjadze, Lucy Dodd, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Sylvie Fleury, Cyprien Gaillard, Gilbert & George, Andreas Gursky, Nancy Holt, Jenny Holzer, Gary Hume, Anne Imhof, Robert Irwin, Arthur Jafa, Craig Kauffman, Karen Kilimnik, Joseph Kosuth, Barbara Kruger, David Lamelas, Louise Lawler, Mire Lee, Anthony McCall, Robert Morris, Reinhard Mucha, Senga Nengudi, David Ostrowski, Otto Piene, Michail Pirgelis, Gala Porras-Kim, Stephen Prina, Jon Rafman, Bridget Riley, Pamela Rosenkranz, Sterling Ruby, Ed Ruscha, Analia Saban, David Salle, Thomas Scheibitz, Andreas Schulze, Cindy Sherman, Stephen Shore, Martine Syms, Ryan Trecartin, Rosemarie Trockel, Nora Turato, Kaari Upson, Kara Walker, John Waters, Andro Wekua, and Andrea Zittel.

Michail Pirgelis
Seven Springs
May 3–July 26, 2025
Berlin

Seven Springs presents a new group of wall and floor sculptures by Michail Pirgelis that feature stripes and other flag-like elements. Together with wallpaper installations – a recent extension of the artist’s practice – they highlight Pirgelis’ relentless synthesis of painting, sculpture and environment. Drawn from disused remnants of the airline industry, the works of Pirgelis both reinvigorate and challenge the conventions of post-minimalism, the readymade and conceptual art.

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
Adopted
February 7–March 8, 2014
Berlin

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.

Michail Pirgelis
Akropolis
January 30–April 1, 2010
Berlin

Accrochage: Zeichnungen
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.