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until 07.02. | #4885ARTatBerlin | Galerie feinart berlin shows from Thursday, 04. December 2025 the exhibition Here Today, Gone Tomorrow by the artists Michael Jastram and Michael Dressel.
The sculptures of Michael Jastram and the desert photographs of Michael Dressel converge in their awareness of the essence of time.
The exhibition is an encounter between two close friends in their artistic work, whose paths first crossed 47 years ago at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee, then scattered in different directions during the upheavals of the Berlin reunification period, and finally came together again in 2016. Just as external circumstances shaped their biographies, the sculptures of Michael Jastram and the photographs of Michael Dressel, taken in the North American desert, touch on a common theme: an awareness of the nature of time.
One need not recall Hannes Wader’s lyrics to „Heute hier, morgen dort“ (1972) to hear a quiet melancholy about the fleetingness of the moment and the uncertainty of the future in the exhibition title chosen by the artists. Their works prove that there is a special beauty in the silence of this awareness.
Michael Jastram, The Return of the Ten, 2024, Bronce, 34 x 103 x 14,5cm. ©M.Jastram
Michael Jastram’s bronze sculptures — boats, moon vehicles, horsewomen, cloud houses — seem to come from distant times and move towards an uncertain future. Being on the move is their destiny, and they are aware of the relentless way in which the present falls into the past. Perhaps this is precisely why Jastram’s figures retain a grace and almost contemplative calm that only someone who is superior to time can have. They evoke archetypal images of lonely wanderers, guardians, of „Father and Son’“ (2018) or departed warriors („Return of the 10“ 2024) who have left comrades behind, and demonstrate the sublimity of human self-reflection.
Since 1986, Michael Dressel, who commutes between Los Angeles and Berlin, has been travelling from L.A. to the surrounding Mojave Desert and the Anza-Borego, Sonora and Great Basin deserts in the states bordering California. His images show surreal, bizarre lost places. Lonely huts, petrol stations and graves seem to have hidden themselves from the hustle and bustle of the cities in the midst of the endless expanse of nature. In contrast to the street photography that made Dressel famous on the international photography scene, his desert images appear rather timeless and archaic in their clear yet enigmatic figurativeness. „The moment is a relative present,“ he writes. In the face of the vastness and inhospitability of the desert, punctuated by remnants of civilisation (and occasionally the photographer himself), human existence experiences its existential fragility.
Michael Dressel, Mojave Station, 2024, Pigment Print on Archival Fine Art Paper, 1/6, 115 x 153cm. ©M.Dressel
Time and space have very different meanings in photography and sculpture. The exhibition of this special artistic friendship shows in a poetic way how the two complement each other and can deepen each other’s content, yet they stand on their own in the imagination of their own world.
Opening: Thursday, 04. December 2025, 6-9 pm | 7 pm Official welcome
Exhibition dates: Thursday, 04. December 2025 until Saturday, 07. February 2026
Closing event: Saturday, 07. February 2026, 6-9 pm
To the gallery
Titel image caption: Michael Jastram, Girl and Boat, 2025, bronce / Michael Dressel, Dry Lake, photography, Fine Art Print, Photo credits © feinartberlin
Exhibition Michael Jastram + Michael Dressel – Galerie feinart berlin | Zeitgenössische Kunst Berlin – Contemporary Art – Exhibitions Berlin Galleries| ART at Berlin
