Michael E. Smith occasionally creates drawings as organisational notes for his exhibitions: a to-do list may be intertwined with a sketch outlining an idea for a sculpture, and at times, drawings emerge as impromptu phone scribbles. Over the past fifteen years Smith has accumulated a substantial collection of drawings, collected here for the first time in this publication produced on the occasion of the exhibition Michael E. Smith at the Kunst Museum Winterthur, 3 February – 28 April, 2024.

Produced on the occasion of Michael E. Smith’s exhibition at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlungen, München, 2 September–24 October, 2021.

Michael E. Smith makes sculptures out of cast-offs, waste and other residues of our consumer society. He assembles and manipulates this found material in an unusual way. He isolates objects, makes changes to their form and seeks out the limits of their imaginative power. His presentations are characterised by an intense yet sparse choreography of the exhibition space.

Over the course of approximately one year, The Registry of Promise consisted of four autonomous, interrelated exhibitions, which can be read as individual chapters in a book. In this series, Chris Sharp reflects on our increasingly fraught relationship with what the future may or may not hold, and the work engages with and plays upon the various readings and mutability of “promise”, along with the inevitability of what may come, whether positive or negative. Such polyvalence is particularly topical, as we have shifted from the anthropocentric promise of modernity to a negative faith in the post-human.

Including artists Becky Beasley, Patrick Bernatchez, Juliette Blightman, Peter Buggenhout, Nina Canell, Michael Dean, Alexander Gutke, Jochen Lempert, Jean-Luc Moulène, Marlie Mul, Matt Mullican, Rosalind Nashashibi, Antoine Nessi, Jean-Marie Perdrix, Reto Pulfer, Mandla Reuter, Hans Schabus, Lucy Skaer, Michael E. Smith, Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli, Francisco Tropa, Andy Warhol, Anicka Yi.

Michael E. Smith (born 1977 in Detroit) makes sculptures out of cast-offs, waste and other residues of our consumer society. He assembles and manipulates this found material in an unusual way. He isolates objects, makes changes to their form and seeks out the limits of their imaginative power. His presentations are characterized by an intense yet sparse choreography of the exhibition space.

Initially conceived to document three solo shows at de Appel in Amsterdam (2015), Kunstverein Hannover (2015), and S.M.A.K. in Ghent (2017), the publication also gathers new commissioned texts and a reprint that shed light on the artist’s decade-plus practice.

With texts by Martin Germann, Anthony Huberman, Chris Sharp.

Produced on the occasion of Michael E. Smith’s exhibition at Ludwig Forum fur internationale Kunst, Aachen, 21 April–23 June, 2013.

“Smith’s inspiration comes from his perception of the economic and social crisis in the USA, a general decline foreshadowed long ago by the demise of the automotive industry in his hometown, Detroit. A moment of assertion against the pressure of such conditions materialises itself in his objects and shows itself clearly in his titles and video clips.”—Ludwig Forum

With essays by Brigitte Franzen, Simone Menegoi, Dieter Roelstraete, Anna Sophia Schultz and Chris Sharp.