Wawrzyniec Tokarski

Wawrzyniec Tokarski

OWN WORLD

The Polish artist, born in Gdansk in 1968 and living in Berlin, presents a work strongly anchored in contemporary culture. The mixture of styles taken from our everyday life challenges us and offers us a new reading of our environment.

This exhibition is organised in partnership with Malteser International, which is currently providing considerable support to the Ukrainian people.

The title of this exhibition is taken from the text into the work «We are living in our own World». By omitting all but the last two words, Tokarski deliberately creates an ambiguity; Own World begs the question « Whose world? » « Who owns the world? » And just like that the artist brings to the fore a major contradiction that is played out on a daily basis; on the one hand we are self-involved living in our own little worlds, and on the other hand, most of the time, we are quite happy to pretend the world is nothing to do with us- we disown the world.

In this context Tokarski’s personal concerns with the environment loom large. Juxtaposition and irony are often self-contained within the works, for instance Never Mind is an ingenious, and amusing, subversion of Baroque vantitas painting, but they also play out across the exhibition space. In his Galaxy Sparrows and Deep Field paintings we get a moment of infinity that does nothing and goes nowhere in the unspoiled serenity of outer-space. This jars visually with the 6m2 worth of car in the painting Going Nowhere in which the artist evokes the absurdity of sitting in gridlocked traffic, polluting the atmosphere and going nowhere - except oblivion if we continue to poison the planet we live on as is made abundantly clear in his work EXTINCT.

The exhibition is primarily concerned with the environment, but of course there are poignant references to the humanitarian cause for which we are gathered here with Malteser International. In the Field, Blue Yellow and Refugees Welcome may adopt the vocabulary of mass-produced slogans but we must not forget that they are paintings - unique pieces. Not mass-produced flyers or memes to be circulated and discarded. Each one is an art-object, beautifully and meticulously made, whose permanence reflects the permanence of the messages the artist puts forward in defence of the world and humanity itself.

Tokarski is an artist who tries his best to live by the environmental and humanitarian concerns knowing he might not be met every time. Together with the Gallery Nosbaum Reding he has chosen to donate a third of the profits from the sales of his works to the Ukraine crisis via Malteser International.