BUY ME
EGO-DEATH-POSTHEDONICNIHILISM - 2025
curated by Maria Pia Napolitano de Majo
EGO-DEATH—posthedonicnihilism is both the culmination and the overturning of the themes and forms that artist Maximilian Gutmair has explored over the past decade.
Installed in the basement of Munich’s AdBK — karmatically placed in the very room dedicated to the Academy’s ceramics workshop — EGO-DEATH becomes a space of suspension, yet also one of overflowing life.
A planimetry of architectures hovers just above a thin layer of fog and plastic film: temple-like ceramic sculptures and fountains, overtaken by a hypertrophic nature. The room is transformed into a contradictory sensorial environment, where the volume of water-pumping constructions coexists with weightless fog and Giovanni Raabe’s soundscape, composed from field recordings of the installation’s own materials.
Gutmair’s background as a florist — and their family’s connection to greenhouses in the countryside of Baden Württemberg — grounds the artist’s subconscious tie to emotional landscapes of architectures that are connected to the flora. If fountains are typically socialized as urban commons, here they become sites of Nature’s reclaiming: spikes and lumps, reminiscent of carnivorous plants, emerge — at times opening into toothed mouths.
Water flows through a post-apocalyptic environment, where the hybris of humankind was overthrown, and life is once again free to flourish in calm resilience. The stillness and cyclical flow within the room counteract the rushing linearity of the neoliberal ideal. Thus, the posthumous flair is tied to a primitive understanding of Life, with the emergence of shapes that resemble corals and the chimney-like mineral structures on the seafloor that could have helped create the RNA molecules that gave rise to life on Earth and hold promise to the emergence of life on distant planets.
Queerness manifests as a form of cross-pollination: a porous exchange between organic excess and constructed form, between cultivation and what escapes control. It departs from the nihilistic stance of “we might as well enjoy” — a posture of resignation or hedonistic escape — and gestures instead toward a more expansive, generative mode of being: one that understands Love not as fleeting pleasure or sentiment, but as a vital, sustaining force — a mode of relation that aSirms life itself. In this light, cross-pollinating queerness becomes an invitation to reimagine relationality, care, and futurity — through the lens of interconnection and transformative affection.
Installed in the basement of Munich’s AdBK — karmatically placed in the very room dedicated to the Academy’s ceramics workshop — EGO-DEATH becomes a space of suspension, yet also one of overflowing life.
A planimetry of architectures hovers just above a thin layer of fog and plastic film: temple-like ceramic sculptures and fountains, overtaken by a hypertrophic nature. The room is transformed into a contradictory sensorial environment, where the volume of water-pumping constructions coexists with weightless fog and Giovanni Raabe’s soundscape, composed from field recordings of the installation’s own materials.
Gutmair’s background as a florist — and their family’s connection to greenhouses in the countryside of Baden Württemberg — grounds the artist’s subconscious tie to emotional landscapes of architectures that are connected to the flora. If fountains are typically socialized as urban commons, here they become sites of Nature’s reclaiming: spikes and lumps, reminiscent of carnivorous plants, emerge — at times opening into toothed mouths.
Water flows through a post-apocalyptic environment, where the hybris of humankind was overthrown, and life is once again free to flourish in calm resilience. The stillness and cyclical flow within the room counteract the rushing linearity of the neoliberal ideal. Thus, the posthumous flair is tied to a primitive understanding of Life, with the emergence of shapes that resemble corals and the chimney-like mineral structures on the seafloor that could have helped create the RNA molecules that gave rise to life on Earth and hold promise to the emergence of life on distant planets.
Queerness manifests as a form of cross-pollination: a porous exchange between organic excess and constructed form, between cultivation and what escapes control. It departs from the nihilistic stance of “we might as well enjoy” — a posture of resignation or hedonistic escape — and gestures instead toward a more expansive, generative mode of being: one that understands Love not as fleeting pleasure or sentiment, but as a vital, sustaining force — a mode of relation that aSirms life itself. In this light, cross-pollinating queerness becomes an invitation to reimagine relationality, care, and futurity — through the lens of interconnection and transformative affection.