Manuel Goetz (b. 1994, Munich) lives and works in Berlin. Trained as a metal fabricator and industrial mechanic, he develops a sculpture in which manufacturing precision, corporeality and psychological tension meet. He builds bodies out of the material logic of the machine — the exhaust manifold, the frame, the bundled tube — until industrial metal takes on the appearance of a body it was never meant to be. Metal becomes muscle, the weld seam becomes sinew.

At the centre is the compulsion to optimize, running until blackout. The subject fuses with the machine until it is no longer clear who carries whom — a body held in tension, tuned to peak performance until it collapses into its own exhaustion. The work stays suspended between machine and organism, discipline and collapse.

The sculptures are beautiful, and they are an assault. They recall armour and apparatus without ever making a statement, and nothing is concealed: every weld, every cut mouth is left in view. Rather than explaining, they force viewers to confront their own fascination with violence and optimization. It is a form of opacity — the work refuses any single reading and keeps its answer to itself.