In Berlin, a gallery floor is disappearing, one stone at a time.
In this episode of The Art Bystander Podcast, Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar meets Michael Sailstorfer at Galerie Judin’s Mercator Höfe space for a conversation about artistic freedom, physical labour and the uncertainty that runs through the German artist’s latest installation, Pull the Rug.
Around 11,000 paving stones cover the exhibition floor. Every 50 seconds, a worker removes one and feeds it through an opening in the wall. A concealed machine then propels it into an adjoining room, sending the sound and vibration of its impact back into the gallery. Over the course of the exhibition, the floor is gradually removed, exposing the sand beneath.
Born in Bavaria in 1979, Sailstorfer grew up around his family’s stone workshop before studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and Goldsmiths in London. Now based in Berlin, he has spent more than two decades expanding sculpture through movement, sound, scent and processes of transformation and destruction.
Their conversation moves from his childhood and early ambitions to the pressures of finding success while still at art school, the importance of working directly with materials, and the unpredictable relationship between an idea and its realisation. Sailstorfer explains why he once considered becoming a farmer or an architect, and why the freedom of art ultimately persuaded him to take another path.
Returning to Pull the Rug, they discuss the stability he remembers from his own childhood, the world his children are growing up in, and the uneasy proximity of repetitive labour, contemplation and aggression. A simple act of feeding a stone into a wall becomes the starting point for a wider discussion about machinery, responsibility and what happens when the consequences of our actions are hidden from view.
Recorded at Galerie Judin, Berlin, during Berlin Art Week 2026.
Michael Sailstorfer: Pull the Rug
10 September to 10 October 2026
Galerie Judin, Mercator Höfe, Berlin