Florian Slotawa #2

Florian Slotawa: Ceiling, 2007. (bron: artnet)

Florian Slotawa: Ceiling, 2007. (bron: Galleria Suzy Shammah)

"....
Whoever visited his solo show at Suzy Shammah gallery in Milan does certainly remember the first, disconcerting impact. Nothing on the walls, nothing on the floor. The gallery was empty enough to instill the doubt that the pile of press releases laid in a corner was in fact the work, or that it was a remake of Klein’s Le Vide. Reading the exhibition information was of great help in solving the mystery. The spectators had to look up at the ceiling which the artist had covered with white panels from the ceiling of his studio in Berlin (from which he had been evicted recently before). A formally radical and self-biographical work that offers an extreme synthesis of Florian Slotawa’s poetics.
....
Eva Fabbris: I would like to start from the work exhibited at Suzy Shammah Gallery. Tell me about it.

Florian Slotawa: It’s the ceiling of my studio. The story behind it is this: I got the message that I had to leave the studio, and at the same time I had the proposal of the show form Suzy. So I decided to combine the two occurrences, and I brought the ceiling of my studio to Suzy. Normally, the space of the gallery is very clear, so I thought such an intervention could result into something subtle and trenchant. The ceiling is very ugly because it is a typical ceiling you can find in an office of the late Seventies; but on the other hand, it is part of the history of the building, and there are traces, dirt, holes. So the idea was just to bring it to Suzy; to bring it from Germany to Italy.
...."
(bron: Mousse Magazine, tekst: Eva Fabbris)

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