One man’s trash is nother man’s treasure. What is touched by Martin Kaltwasser turns into gold – if one agrees to take for gold those materials and artworks that are created when Kaltwasser engages with the trashed objects of urban space. Working in many fields and under varying auspices he nevertheless always returns to one object: the automobile. No matter if he dismantles a Saab Turbo 900 in order to build two bicycles from its pieces or creates a performative sculpture with his colleagues Folke Köbberling and David Moises that stages the clash of technology and ephemeral structures by way of a car park scenery, or if he constructs the most hedonistic of all icons of the neoliberal era, a Porsche Cayenne, out of nothing but plywood inside an old war bunker – the car always finds its way back into his work. And this was also the case for his work during CityLeaks 2017 when Kaltwasser once more drew on contemporary car design’s simultaneous inflantilisation and militarisation and its underlying ideology by reserving one of Cologne’s very scarce parking lots for his Snoobycar, a Bobbycar blown up to the size of a regular car.
Eigelstein, 50668 Köln