Galleria Suzy Shammah

Florian Slotawa

16 Sep. - 13 Nov. 2010

Installation view

Florian Slotawa develops his work starting from the consideration of the given situation where he finds himself. This can be whether his own – his studio, his home, his belongings, or the institution's inviting him for an exhibition – its collection, its furniture, its space. This formal canon is typically at work in all of his interventions, should it be the case of the displacement of the ceiling of his studio and reinstalling it into a gallery space (Galleria Suzy Shammah, 2007) or showing into a fairground (Art Basel Unlimited, 2010), a constructed cube housing a video-projection of the very same cube, previously settled in the artist's studio. Slotawa uses relocation and decontextualisation processes arising questions about the status of art and about the status of the exhibition space at large.

For his second solo exhibition at Galleria Suzy Shammah, Slotawa turns for the first time to his family possessions, more precisely to his parents' garage. He takes the ensemble of garden tools from their wall and replicates, in his studio, the same series several times. The objects, taken away from their usual context, are assembled to compose autonomous images, where their function is taken over from their formal features and compositional potential. The classical idea of the original and its copy is challenged, as it is the conceptual art postulate stating the identity of an object with its own definition. In the gallery, he introduces an additional uncanny element by reproducing the texture of the garage's outer wall therefore relocating conceptually the original space. The atmosphere of the suburban Rosenheim in the exhibition rooms, while talking about the artist's identity, subtly allow for an unusual perception of the familiar, including our own expectations.