Art to Touch S
EXHIBITION

The Oldenburg sculptor Michael Olsen shows exciting sculptures.

‘Touching the objects is expressly permitted’, says sculptor Michael Olsen. The largely abstract sculptures made of wood, stone and metal challenge us to trace their shapes and surfaces with our fingers. Objects symbolize life. Opposites complement each other. The basis of his work are different woods, whereby he particularly loves the millennia-old moorlands. He often retrieves bristled or storm-cut trees from the forest, processes them with chainsaw and axe in varying degrees of intensity, sometimes the original tree is still clearly visible, and combines the wood with steel, hot-rolled sheet or strip steel in an elaborate and force-demanding technique.

As robust as the works seem at first glance, so multi-layered is the significance of the plastic compositions. The contrasting properties of the materials, cold and warm, smooth and rough, hard and soft, convey associations in carrying and loads, in peace and dynamics, in nature and technology. The metal injures and cuts through the wood, but it also connects and envelops it at the same time. In this way, these sculptures convey aesthetics, movement, emotions and spiritual experience.

Liane Thau
(quoted in excerpts)

WÜRZBURG

Opposites complement each other

The Würzburg BBK Gallery in the Kulturspeicher shows the powerful works of the Oldenburger.

For ‘Blues in e (for E.C.)’, Michael Olsen has combined oak wood and sheet steel into one unit.

‘Touching the objects is expressly permitted’, says Michael Olsen. These are powerful works that Olsen presents here under the overarching title ‘Antagonisms / Contraria sunt complementa’, which translates as ‘the opposites complement each other’.

In his objects, 52-year-old Olsen combines very different materials, such as stone, wood and metal, and creates a new form that rests in itself. In doing so, the artist orients himself to the specifications that nature makes him, especially to tree trunks, which in some of his works are 9000-year-old moorlands. The highlight here is that Michael Olsen often adapts the much harder metallic material to the grown wood.

This is particularly evident in the work ‘Blues in e’, in which an inserted black sheet traces the course of a lying oak trunk. And because this trunk is naturally twisted many times, the integrated metal creates a visible melody arc. Nature and technology form a new unity here. "Technology is also a part of nature", explains Olsen, who wants to combine the fragmentary into a new harmony.

Michael Olsen always has his work completely finished in his head before he starts working with chainsaws and other equipment in his workshop (he doesn't like the term studio).

Frank Kupke
(quoted in excerpts)