The Wilhelm Morgner Museum in Soest, Germany is preparing to unveil an extraordinary and deeply personal exhibition featuring approximately 70 drawings by local artist Michel M. The exhibition, titled "Indefinite Truthing," will showcase four decades of the artist's work spanning from 1984 to 2025, offering visitors a journey through provocative, surreal, and often disturbing artistic expressions.

The exhibition's title itself requires careful consideration, as "truthing" is used as a verb rather than a noun, reflecting the artist's commitment to revealing honest perspectives behind societal facades. Michel M.'s collection consists entirely of DIN A4 format drawings created with graphite in various strengths and tones. The artist expresses his preference for grayscale palettes and lines ranging from delicate to bold, allowing him to convey deep meaning through the contrast and depth achieved in black and white compositions.

"I'm making myself naked," Michel M. explains about his work, emphasizing the intensely personal nature of the exhibition. His drawings feature motifs that are alternately bizarre, provocative, ruthlessly honest, and sometimes deeply unsettling. Museum director Michael Stockhausen attempts to categorize the work as having surreal influences while belonging more to fantastic art or a form of fantastic realism. The pieces invite viewers to look closely precisely because of their unconventional and challenging nature.

Many of the drawings require a second look to fully comprehend their meaning. Viewers often need to mentally rotate or extend the motifs to discover new perspectives and previously unnoticed elements within the compositions. The title piece, "Sleep Reason!", depicts a resting head on a plane, from which delicate lines form the contours of multiple faces. This motif evokes dreams and the empty mind that seems to abandon reason during sleep, while the brain continues to run uncontrollably at full speed.

Other works in the collection, including "Vaginal Path-Decision," "Friend Bowling," and "DEAD Birth," feature skeletal figures that appear as shadowy, sketched representations of beings experiencing or inflicting harm. The viewer's attention is drawn to genitalia, horrifying distorted faces, and horror creatures tearing apart animals. Additional figures and line work develop from these central images, causing the motifs to grow beyond the picture frame or leave empty spaces behind.

Michel M. describes his creative process as one where he allows his thoughts to flow freely with an initial idea in mind, deliberately switching off conscious control. This approach explains why he has titled his series "Automatic Drawings." According to museum director Stockhausen, these intimate thoughts and ideas that find their way onto paper are always searching for knowledge and the primordial, perfectly capturing the essence of "truthing."

The artist, who maintains a studio with the Echtoper Artist Community Graf Yorck, would have preferred to display 300 works but had to make careful selections for the exhibition. He chose pieces that, despite their full drawing impact, are sometimes more difficult to access and interpret. These works function as sociopolitical time documents that require patient observation to fully understand.

"Sometimes you have to look at the drawings as long as I spent creating them," Michel M. jokes, revealing his inspiration from artists like Horst Janssen while expressing little regard for Picasso but great appreciation for Hans Kaiser. Appropriately, his works will be displayed in the Hans Kaiser Hall. The artist emphasizes his desire to engage and reach his audience, to honestly negotiate subjects rather than hide them, viewing art as communication.

Michel M.'s decision to anonymize his name reflects his philosophy that art should focus on the subject matter rather than the personality behind it. Beyond his artistic practice, he actively advocates for his professional community through his engagement with the Professional Association of Visual Artists.

The exhibition "Indefinite Truthing" will open on Saturday, September 13, at 5 PM at the Wilhelm Morgner Museum. The opening ceremony will feature introductory remarks from Deputy Mayor Christiane Mackensen, Wolfgang Türk (Cultural Office Director from Warendorf), and Michael Stockhausen (Director of Soest Museums). The accompanying program includes an artist talk titled "Sleep Reason!" with Michel M. at 7 PM in the museum, followed by a museum tour with Dr. Martina Padberg, Director of the Ahlen Art Museum, on Tuesday, October 14, at 6 PM. A family day is scheduled for Sunday, November 2, from 11 AM to 5 PM, where visitors can work with pencils and colors in the museum. The exhibition will run through November 16, and a catalog will be published to accompany the show.