Michèle Pagel
White Trash Bag #1 and #2 (2023)
White Trash Bag #1 (Stammhalter), photo: Brandstaetter-Foundation, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna
There is something sinister and dystopian in the way Michèle Pagel looks at the symbols and myths that make up a cult of the rural and folkloric. Two trash bags filled with plaster overflow from corset-like boy-and-girl costumes of the kind worn on folk festivals and other occasions. The title, the poor materials, the weight of her two sculptures, all express the artist’s sense of alarm, now that the disenfranchised “silent majority” is mobilized by right-wing ideologies, xenophobia, and the Identitarian movement.
Pagel dismisses the idea of an “innocent” and “pure” pastoral landscape, combining a brutalist aesthetic with caricatural elements and translating the classist slur “white trash” into sculpture. She thus warns about the revival of nationalist fantasies and their touristic marketing to a politically amorphous yet restless and economically precarious audience: a factor not just in folk festivals and the like, but now also redefining electoral politics in Austria and Germany.
Michèle Pagel (1985, Werdau, Germany) is an artist working with conceptual sculptures and installations, revealing the inner beauty or dark underbelly of everyday materials and objects. Her works have recently been shown in group exhibitions at Belvedere 21 and MAK, Vienna, among others. Solo exhibitions include: Salzburger Kunstverein (2023); Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna (2022 and 2023); Austrian Cultural Forum, Moscow (2019); and Leslie Gallery, Berlin (2016). She lives in Vienna.
White Trash Bag #1 (Stammhalter) (Firstborn Male Descendent, 2023)
White concrete, steel, 80 × 40 × 40 cm
White Trash Bag #2 (Infantin) (Infanta, 2023)
White concrete, steel, 75 × 80 × 30 cm
Courtesy of Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna