German-born, Cologne-based Greek artist Michail Pirgelis creates his sculptures out of decommissioned airplane parts. Even before knowing that fact, his first solo exhibition at Spruth Magers London consumes the viewer nonetheless – there is a striking visual quality in these weighty and simple objects.

Since 2003, Pirgelis has made frequent visits to the ‘boneyards’ strewn across the USA, legendary resting places and holding facilities of scores of obsolete aircraft and flight-related paraphernalia. These materials are remnants of the multibillion-dollar aviation industry. Their incongruity as artistic entities, laden with the symbolism of American luxury, the American dream of flying, is all the more powerful given that the artist’s works are often reintegrated back into functioning aircraft. 

With Bateleur (2011), seatbelts and fuselage are united in an attempt to explore the precariousness of flight: ‘bateleur’ being the French term for tightrope walker, but also the name of a species of eagle. Untitled (From the Air Saddles #7) (2011) is one of a series of pieces that fuse thick rubber strops with slices of the highly polished fuselage with the window frames still visible. The title of the show – Los Angeles – further unifies this sense of urban lack.

Pirgelis, who was the recipient of the Audi Art Award for ‘New Positions’ at Art Cologne last year and was also awarded the Schloss Ringenberg Stipendium, is brilliantly in tune with human frailty. Though he doesn’t use objects found from plane wreckages, his disused components still evoke considered amount of trepidation. Schmale Kapsel / Narrow Capsule (2011), for example, confronts the viewer with the physical and technological fact of flight: the normally invisible workings of the capsule are exposed as human.

The exhibition succeeds in its stripped-down look at the instability of industry, and the psychological denial that allow humans to fly. Pirgelis’ sense of modern fragility and contemporary formalism makes him one of the most exciting sculptors today.