Michael Kalmbach and Stephan Melzl have been friends since they were students, and the one has always accompanied and treasured the work of the other. At Loock Galerie, they present their work together for the first time since a 1986 exhibition in Frankfurt. Michael Kalmbach will be showing his largest sculpture to date, Zugspitze. Six meters tall, the sculpture will dominate the central space of the gallery. Melzl will be showing six of his small format paintings in the second space of the gallery.

On the painting of Stephan Melzl, Dorothea Strauss writes: “The new works by Stephan Melzl show a disturbing view of the world. Disturbing not because the images tell of an open and recognizable danger, but because their intimate, mystical tone disconcerts us. They give us no clear guidelines about how to arrive at a judgment; they do not call to us to understand what is happening. They truly leave us hanging. The works of Stephan Melzl exemplify the power of the image to transcend rational thought. For the representation of inner states and fantasies, he constructs object worlds of a strange melancholy and at the same time with a humorous comic aspect. The contradictory sensations that are triggered by his images land in the realm of their own contradiction, and hardly anything seems sure about these images. They attest to a fragmented, an ambivalent state of mastering outer and inner reality.”