Stuart Shave / Modern Art is pleased to present Polish artist Wawrzyniec Tokarski in his first solo show in the UK.

With a strong understanding of Semiotics, Tokarski’s most recent series of paintings borrow and manipulate familiar symbols and typefaces to create a layered and complex critique of the dissemination of information within our media saturated culture. Tokarski deliberately places symbols and motifs that evoke particular associations within the viewer, building and capitalising on these connotations Tokarski adds opposing texts to create a dichotomy within the paintings’ reading.

In the painting Against Freedom, Tokarski creates a visual landscape of politically charged defiance to deliver the title’s inherently contradictory message. Within this conflict in visual delivery and the intended literal meaning of the words, Tokarski conflates content and aesthetic to highlight the overwhelming influence that visual imagery holds over our reading and understanding of text. Tokarski often utilises the dictatorial voices of authoritative bodies or images synonymous with propaganda aesthetics to question the discrepancies within the political world's party manifestos and their physical actions.

Tokarski’s works are painted in watercolour and acrylic and are the combination of several differing qualities of line; unrestricted free-hand flows alongside the precisely masked off boundary lines and defined edges of the texts. These varied approaches to mark making suggest the converging of personalities and events in a way that mimics the stages of the graffiti’d street wall; repeatedly written and re-written over time. The contradictory styles of applying the paint - human versus mechanic - further underlines the calculated and provocative ambiguity within Tokarski’s communicative intent.

Wawrzyniec Tokarski was born in Gdansk, Poland in 1968 and now lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Studying at the Academy of Arts in Stuttgart, Tokarski was a student of Joseph Kosuth and K.R.H Sonderborg, later attending the Karlsruhe Kunst Akademie under the tuition of Helmut Dorner. Tokarski will have a solo exhibition of new paintings in early 2007 at the Saarland Museum in Saabrücken, Germany, which will be accompanied by a retrospective catalogue.