Johann König, Berlin is delighted to present new works by Michaela Meise in this, her fifth solo exhibition. The artist herself characterizes the exhibition in the following words:

“In the gallery space you can find two circles - in the middle, a circular table bench and around the walls a circle of portraits. There is no philosophy behind the group of people portrayed, at least no conscious one. The people depicted here are unsurprising choices: friends, female and male, the daughters of friends, my boyfriend, but also people encountered by chance. The common ground between them is that they are all living people.
We have sat in one another’s presence and looked at one another. Each relief marks a period of one to two hours. The overlaid portrait “Birgit and Anna” accordingly marks two periods of time, which took place one after the other.

As a material, clay is soft, has its own weight, is non-toxic and easy to handle. It has a special tactile quality which the philosopher Luce Irigary described in conversation as “perpetual touch”: the material is touched and at the same time touches you. In the course of the drying process, clay becomes mimosa-like, sensitive to jolts, to temperature and to humidity. My examples have perhaps already suggested the point: clay is a material outstandingly suited to representing human beings. Most ceramic portraits are a marbling of two types of clay, thus intensifying potential tensions in the material. The glaze is always monochrome, differences in colour arising actually only because of the various colours of the clays and because of one layer of glaze trickling through the next.”