Sven Sachsalber
Racing Suits
February 19 - April 20, 2019
Sven Sachsalber’s first public notice came on the occasion of his performance at the Palais de Tokyo. Sachsalber looked for a needle in a haystack. He found it eventually. In another performance, he ate a species of poisonous mushrooms to experience the particular and unique effect of his vision turning green for two days. And in a performance that became a video work, Sachsalber spent 24 hours in his bedroom with a cow. For his first solo exhibition in New York, at White Columns, he worked every day on a puzzle with his father, in the gallery. They never finished the 13,000 piece puzzle, a reproduction of The Creation of Adam, by Michelangelo. Sachsalber also planned to travel to Russia to save Pussy Riot from prison, but this project went unrealized. In 2017, he made a book comprised solely of Bruno Bischofberger’s ads on the backcover of Artforum with all dates and information redacted. It was such a good idea that Peter Fischli did the same book a year later.
Sachsalber’s works in this exhibition are paintings on canvas. Sachsalber cuts and sews together a canvas facsimile of the front half of a ski racing suit. He then sews the life size racing suit onto a flat canvas and stretches it. The result is an empty suit, half submerged into the surface of the painting. The suits are hand painted replicas of the German downhill racing team uniforms from the 1990s. The design of the team’s suits are monochrome, in black, white and gray, and feature a zebra stripe motif, as well as the German eagle and logos from the team sponsors, including Audi, Bogner, and Würth, rendered by Sachsalber using a brush and stencils. Two suits are all black, from 1994: one for the Lillehammer Oympics (which due to Olympic regulation that year, could not feature any corporate logos except the Olympic rings), and another for the World Cup, which sports not only logos of the team’s corporate sponsors but also a stamp with a pink bar that reads, “Keine Macht Den Drogen” (No Power to Drugs) - a warning issued amongst the heraldry of competition. The German suits differed from all other national teams in that their design resulted in a type of camouflage, imbuing the team with a sinister, chic militarism. These deflated, empty suits merge with the background, becoming a painting.
Sven Sachsalber was born in 1987 in the Südtirol, in Silandro, Italy. He lives and works in New York.
For more information, please contact Mike Egan at mike@ramiken.biz, or call (917) 434-4245.