current exhibition 

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When everything is all in one colour, how do we then perceive the shapes of things? How strongly does colour, in fact, influence the way we see everyday objects? And does our aesthetic experience depend on the context in which we are seeing a thing? Michael Volkmer’s signature colour is the shade RAL1015 that bears the colour name Light ivory. This shade is so neutral that it attracts no attention; the eye is focused entirely on the shape. RAL1015 is probably the most obvious commonality among Michael Volkmer’s sculptural works. His itinerant memorial to the victims of forced sterilisations, on the move through Mannheim since 2013, is one of those sculptures in this neutral shade, and can be presently seen in R5, 6.

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Michael Volkmer paints elaborately designed spirit bottles in this shade, arranges them in pyramids so they look like art deco skyscrapers, and lends the whole a title that is humorously ironic and ambiguous at once: ‘The Spirits I Summoned’. Some of his wall objects have the lovely appeal of rose windows in Gothic cathedrals – except they are monochrome. The ornamental lattices, however, come from wholly profane hubcaps, of the kind we occasionally find at the roadside. Volkmer installs them into MDF casings and illuminates them. It is just a small step from the transcendental light experience to the plain illuminated object. Michael Volkmer plays with the casualness of the familiar and mundane, queries the ostensibly safe, lends trash the appearance of sublimity and in doing so, demonstrates to us quite incidentally the fragility of our value system. In ‘Colloquium’, an installation that he varies site-specifically according to location, Volkmer assembles non-functioning lamp stands on pedestals, transforming the stands into sculpture. He matches them by painting them the same shade, simultaneously steering attention onto the diversity of shapes in this assemblage. Meanwhile, the light is provided by uniformly shaped modern fluorescent tubes, whereas the lamp stands are now mere relicts of past times.

For the first time, the Heinrich Vetter Stiftung and the Cultural Office of the City of Mannheim are jointly handing over the ‘Mannheim Midcareer Award for Fine Art’ – an endowed distinction for fine artists aged 40+. The associated exhibition will take place in PORT25 – Raum für Gegenwartskunst. The installation and conceptual artist Michael Volkmer, born in Ludwigshafen in 1966, studied at the Freie Akademie Rhein-Neckar in Mannheim and has exhibited regularly for more than thirty years. With fellow artist Eric Carstensen he established superart.tv, a duo of video artists devoted to critical artistic nonsense. Every four years, the ‘Mannheim Midcareer Award for Fine Art’ is scheduled to distinguish artists who have been active in the region for many years and hence render an important contribution to cultural life.

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Award ceremony of the ‘Mannheim Midcareer Award for Fine Art’ to Michael Volkmer by the Heinrich Vetter Stiftung and the Cultural Office of the City of Mannheim

19 September 2025, 7 p.m.

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