A number of different visual media can be seen to exert a mutual influence on each other in Michael Danner’s creative output. His reduced ink drawings on canvas and paper could just as easily be preliminary drafts for sculptural works, while conversely his filigree steel sculptures and installations may be viewed as drawings in space. The artist’s attention is always largely trained on observing the tensions, which over and beyond the materiality of his means he also wishes to be seen as metaphors for human existence and society.

The heavy loads formed by massive steel plates, stone blocks and long bales of fabric are attached by Danner to fragile looking rods and strips of spring steel, which he finely balances to form constructions capable of bearing the weight. While these tentative arrangements seem frail and unstable at first, they nevertheless demonstrate a surprising flexibility and dynamism when touched and made to move. As such Michael Danner produces kinetic objects, because they can be set in motion as part of a performance by the artist, or by passing exhibition goers.

In contrast to a smooth, even, mechanical or computer controlled motion, the amplitude and duration of an object’s oscillations depend on the individual impulse given by the artist or the beholder – meaning that the result is in all cases different and ultimately not fully calculable.

Danner’s piece Quadrat-Kubus III [Square Cube III] shows in exemplary fashion how he goes about uniting apparent opposites. Towering up from the square steel plate on the floor are line-like spring steel struts which elevate a bodiless cube – held together by cords – to the heights. If the object is touched and set into vibration, the cube-shaped figure loses its orthogonal outline. Viewed the other way round, with the gradual ebbing of the vibration generated by human hand, the energy flows back to the massive steel plate on the floor and the cube is once again reconstituted. 

Michael Danner

1951 born in Neu-Ulm

Lives and works in Ulm and Werfen (AT)