From April 26 to July 9, Wawrzyniec Tokarski will be staging his second exhibition at Galerie Jan Wentrup. We are most gratified that the gallery exhibition will mark the start of a comprehensive show of Tokarski's recent works, due to open in the Saarland Museum, Saarbrücken, on May 18. This exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive catalogue published by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
Wawrzyniec Tokarski was born in Gdansk (Poland) in 1968. He studied at the State Academy of the Arts in Gdansk from 1986-88 and then at the Academy of Arts in Stuttgart until 1999 with Joseph Kosuth and K.R.H. Sonderborg, and finally in Karlsruhe with Helmut Dorner. Tokarski has lived and worked in Berlin since 2000.
Tokarski's pictures frequently involve the overlapping of the visual and the textual plane, and the iconography of script, sign and symbols. Here, Tokarski consciously employs a visual language that evinces a media aesthetics. The motifs arouse a superficial confidence that is shattered on closer inspection. The inherent critique is not only communicated on the visual plane, but especially by the inclusion of text that open up a second level of meaning. With Tokarski, words and sentences penetrate the expressive power of the images, extending and enhancing the visual information. In some of his works, the artist goes so far as to turn the words and sentences into the pictorial work of art itself.
The use of script in painting invariably raises the question about the extent to which content can be depicted. Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Weiner and John Baldessari are all significant as regards this exploration of meaning and the comparison of reference and referent.
Tokarski's pictures evolve from the media scrap-heap of television, magazines, computer games and the Internet. When transferred to painting, their surface smoothness often retains a fleeting and incomplete quality. With Tokarski, comprehension of the world takes place through perception of its images. Without making quality distinctions, he utilizes its visual abundance and exposes its components to criticism.
