Installation view


Florian Slotawa (Rosenheim, 1972) transfers his personal life to the artistic sphere by materialising it into a work of art. For his first solo exhibition in Italy, Slotawa has developed an ambiguously invasive strategy divided into two phases. The artist, forced to leave his Berlin studio, decided to dismantle the ceiling and transfer it to the gallery in Milan, thus changing the physical features of the exhibition area, transforming it into a chimera. The project continues in Suzy Shammah's apartment where Slotawa plans to exhibit the photographs of his studio when it was still intact, thus further merging the private and the public area. The estranging experience of the empty gallery is the pivot on which the integrity of the project swings.

The artist creates surprising associations. In his sculptures, he assembles various ordinary objects exploiting their formal and chromatic qualities. For the 2006 Berlin Biennial, the artist built a 7 metre high tower borrowing furniture from the collector who in 2002 purchased Gesamtbesitz, that is all Slotawa's personal belongings. The sculpture made of wardrobes, tables and shelves features a surprising formal unity and suggests simultaneously the act of misappropriation and the emptiness created elsewhere. For the Bonn ordnen exhibition, held in the Museum of Bonn in 2004, Slotawa transferred and reorganised the offices - including the staff - in the exhibition areas, while he showed a selection of his photographs, created for a previous project, in the empty rooms. In his transitory works, he makes temporary transformations in which the conceptual approach is expressed through the use of contextual strategies: the drifting between private and public plays a fundamental role and generates an implicit question as regards to the value of exchange in the practice of art.