Andreas Slominski
OSOLO
Exhibition duration: October 25 – December 9, 2017
While the art world implies that things may often not be what they seem, the universe of the German conceptual and object artist Andreas Slominski makes this the rule rather than the exception.
Since the 1980s, Slominski has gained a reputation as a traitorous exterminator on the international art scene, setting cunning traps for animals, humans, and ideas. His arsenal of seductive contraptions contains a number of real and symbolic pitfalls speculating in rich philosophical by-catches.
Slomiski’s art requires that we allow ourselves to the perception of the unknown, and it seems to urge an imaginary probing of the forbidden by employing an artifice that, at a first glance, appears inconspicuous or even irrelevant to the main idea. He unifies precisely those elements which, according to the moral dictates of our ideas and beliefs, could never be unified. He may land us in precarious situations, asking the impossible such as stipulating that visitors keep off the floors.
Slominski consistently applies dual strategies, which means that his dramatically orchestrated artistic promises mostly will not be fulfilled in the way we expect. His art reflects on the ambivalent aesthetic concepts of the sublime and it questions the principles of attraction and rejection. It messes about with us, making us question our own rationality and sanity, and encourages us to rethink the rules and limitations of both morals and art.
The exhibition at Gerhardsen Gerner mainly features modules used to mount mobile toilet booths or plastic shower cabinets, and Andreas Slominski extends the use of the industrially produced elements playfully.
By modifying and re-arranging the colourful plastic parts, he elaborates his own universally intelligible imagery based on a limited and well-structured ‘grammar’, but the use of plastic as a contemporary and accessible material suggests references to modern society and its many obsessions.
For example, the sensually attractive texture of the plain material and the intense and emotionally affecting concentration of colour emphasize current poetic interrogations of the terms of beauty and sublime. At the same time though, the artist’s thoroughly composed reliefs comment on the use of plastic as an omnipresent resource and thus, they appear as ecological statements such as comments on the principles of consumption and finally as metaphors for live and death.
Slominski’s brightly coloured plastic relief collages dominating the exhibition use motifs that appear familiar. However, reflected in a different material and translated into an altered shape, the original content will gradually break up. In short, the artist is working towards an abstraction that allows a new context, a new interpretation, and a totally new conclusion/concretion. This does not only render Slominski’s art a documentation of the essence of current ideas of art and culture as a flexible and changeable entity, but it makes a permanent and active contribution to the further dynamic evolution of said art and culture.
For further information please contact Atle Gerhardsen, Gerhardsen Gerner, Oslo T: +47 21 91 01 91, office@gerhardsengerner.com or visit our website at http://www.gerhardsengerner.com