In September 2006 Stuart Shave Modern Art will present German artist Florian Slotawa (b. 1972) in his first UK solo show.

Without ever breaking the objects used in his work, Slotawa formulates new constellations and configurations from their component parts. Slotawa has worked in this way making reference to classical painting formulas in his sculptures Last Judgement, 2000, Annunciation, 2003 and Lamentation of Christ, 2004, made from his own domestic furniture and also in the work Mama, 1999 in which he explores literal notions of biography, stacking his possessions into piles the same height as his mother.

Slotawa’s early sculptures were centred around his own belongings in a way that gave monument to his own personal autobiography of possessing; later moving on to work with objects that were made proximate by deliberate changes in his surroundings. For two years from 1998, Slotawa would periodically check into hotels for one night. Reconfiguring the impersonal and superficial guise of domesticity inherent within such spaces, Slotawa created cave like dwellings from the furniture in the room within which he would then spend the night. Returning all items back to their original positions before breakfast, Slotawa’s only remaining evidence of these events would be a series of black and white photographs.

In the work Treasures from Two Millennia, 2001, Slotawa negotiated the movement of artefacts and artworks from the collection of Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach to his home in Berlin, replacing their presence at the museum with photographs documenting their new positions in the artist’s apartment. As well as this illustrative gesture of the substitution, Slotawa exhibited a formal sculpture made from the packing material used to ship the objects to their temporary residence. Organizing Bonn, 2004, at the Bonner Kunstverein, relocated the exhibition spaces to the administration offices, and the administration offices to the exhibition spaces. The exhibition displaying photographs of Slotawa’s meticulous cataloguing of his entire possessions could only be viewed within the dilapidated, vacated office rooms, also forcing the public to enter and leave the building through the staff entrance. In these later projects Slotawa works with the relocation of objects as a means of challenging accepted systems of institutional display which are based in the wider framework of Slotawa’s ongoing dissection of the possibilities within de-contextualisation.

Slotawa will show sculptures from his latest body of work, made from readymade objects, specifically purchased to create the series.

Florian Slotawa lives and works in Berlin and was in included in the Berlin Biennale 2006.