Michael Kalmbach- der Mond scheint rund für jedermann

This is Michael Kalmbach's fifth solo exhibition at the Thomas Rehbein Gallery.

Michael Kalmbach's watercolors and sculptures made from papier-mâché captivate with a unique, imaginative cosmos of figures and forms that the artist has created. Kalmbach's working method is characterized by the emergence of content and forms from his creative process, influenced by factors such as the peculiarities of the materials he uses. Through this open-ended approach, he arrives at narrative visual concepts and sculptural works that quietly and poetically revolve around the recurring elemental themes in his work, such as creation and destruction, family and childhood, power and powerlessness, life and death. The narratives or allusions to themes that the artist explores act as a driving force in the process of creating new images and papier-mâché figures, constantly enriching and renewing his visual language in fluid transitions.

A recurring motif in Kalmbach's work is the representation of the large and the small. One figure evokes another; the small grow out of the large, are carried by them, or represent their body parts. Such playfully whimsical visual concepts were already developed in his picture story The Big and the Small Paul (2003).

In a kind of creation story, the viewer repeatedly encounters the figure of the "little Paul," who vomits out all the frustrations of the world. For some time now, Kalmbach's fascination with the legend of Christopher has served as the driving force behind his imaginative design cosmos. The legend tells of a giant man who carries the infant Jesus on his shoulders across a river. On the nearly floor-to-ceiling sculpture Christopher Puppet, several small figures have settled. In fragile delicacy, the gigantic figure seems to hover above the ground. The mundane material composition of his papier-mâché figures, along with the absence of color, emphasizes their rough-fragile, graceful appearance and gives them an aesthetic quality. Typically, the marionette-like sculptures hang from the ceiling as expansive installations, gradually changing their positions due to the physical influences of their surroundings, creating scenes. Much like a stage set, the viewer enters a unique, fairy-tale world.

Michael Kalmbach's visual language has become distinctly more fragile, both in his sculptural and painterly works. On the light ground of the color-reduced watercolor, his delicate figures, developed from transparent color splashes, float through imaginative, anarchic pictorial spaces. His works remain as open as their artistic creation from the formless. They tell stories while also providing enough space for the viewer's own interpretations and fantasies. Watercolor and sculpture influence each other in the formation of images and visual language. Kalmbach's works narrate, in a blend of delicacy, lightness, and humor, along with erotic allusions, the eternal life cycle of becoming and perishing.

(Miriam Walgate, 2013)