Joris Van de Moortel - Like a hurricane (you are like)
Julika Rudelius - One of Us

October 9 - November 13, 2010
Opening: October 8, 6 - 9 pm

We are delighted to present Martin Wöhrl's solo show CANTINA SOCIALE at Tanja Pol Galerie.

Wöhrl, born 1974 in Munich, presents a new series of sculptures and wallworks. Reminiscent of barrels and kegs this minimalist group of works is made of found and formerly used doors in different colours and qualities, showing either shabby patina or high quality veneer. Wöhrl's contemporary, disrespectful but yet affectionate approach towards the modernist notion of sculpture and his affinity for crafts and traditional cultural practices feature him as one of the most important sculptors of his generation. In preperation for his show he visited the last active cooper in Munich, exchanging ideas about techniques, forms, history and future aspects of this disappearing craft.

"Martin Wöhrl's works always involve content from art and the everyday, style and value, form and surface as well as intention and projection. When one observes the totality of his works one detects a wealth of facets, but also their stringency: from the furniture and wooden-floor installations through the works referring to architecture and those quoting artists to those engaging with ornament and decoration. (...) The objects he quotes and produces in enlarged form as well as in alienated materials take on specific meanings. Martin Wöhrl transforms their symbolism by changing the objects. (...) The artist is taken by the forming or shaping of living environments and living conditions which become further moulded by aspects of cultural history such as architecture, design, fine art, film and music."
(Angelika Nollert: Forms of being, in: Martin Wöhrl, So viel Schoenheit, so viel Freude, auch fuer uns Menschen von heute, Nuremberg 2010.)

Martin Wöhrl studied at the Akademie der bildenden Kuenste in Munich. Recent shows include: Kunsthalle Mannheim, Kunsthalle Muenchen and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris. Wöhrl lives and works in Munich.

An interactive installation of sculpture & sound by Alexandra Wolkowicz & Jon Barraclough for the Unity Theatre, Liverpool to mark its 30th year. A Liverpool Biennial Independents exhibition.

Until January 2011

Historically, theatres were places to come together, to share an experience, a place of telling stories,  learning, ritual and emotional cleansing. This was, and still is, an essentially communal activity. 'Tabula Rasa ' aims to reflect the experience of theatre and to explore its continuous relevance in the digital age. The Unity Theatre is housed in a former synagogue: this piece looks at the parallels between theatre, religious ritual, performance and communion.

As artists, we felt our place was not to try and answer this question but to engage our audience in the issues raised. Theatre is live, truly three dimensional, tactile, immediate, experiential, social, unique and unrepeatable. A visit to the theatre culminates in seeing the performance. From booking a ticket to hearing the post performance views of others on leaving, we are interested in the whole theatre experience. By creating an installation that is intended for the box office/reception space it's possible to reach all aspects of the theatre experience - including the passer-by.

That many have stood in this space in the guise of differing characters and attitudes leaves an imprint on the theatre and the building. During this 30th year anniversary the history of the building, including its former uses and ghosts, can be recollected and represented. We are not so sure about the ability of virtual or digital experiences to generate histories or ghosts in this way.

Jon Barraclough Studied Fine Art Media at Bradford and Graphic Art at Newcastle before working as a photographer and designer in New York and London in the 1980s. Working in the music, fashion and film industries he was a founder member of the Unknown Studio in London, UK and exhibited drawings in group and solo shows there. He began teaching at Newcastle and Liverpool Schools of Art in the early 90s then became Head of School at Liverpool between 1991 and 1996.
He went on to become Creative Director at Nonconform a visual communications consultancy in Liverpool and has exhibited drawings, paintings, film and photography in touring group shows and solo shows in the UK. In 2008 he became a Research Associate at Liverpool School of Art and established Jon Barraclough and Company a collaborative and consulting practice based in Liverpool.

Alexandra Wolkowicz is a Polish/German photographer and artist currently resident in Liverpool UK. Her work explores themes about our relationship with the world and how we share it with each other and other living things.
Her work springs from her experience with photography, performance, theatre and the creation of unique representations of places, things and histories. She works with still and moving imagery often with the addition of sound. Her intervention with things and situations found is to alter, adjust and reconstruct the familiar in order to create moving, thought-provoking and poetic representations.
Her working practice is often collaborative and multidisciplinary choosing to select media appropriate to the aesthetics and content of a particular piece. She has travelled widely and has worked with artists and in residencies in Europe, North America and Asia.

Sea Stories, is the first UK solo exhibition by highly regarded Russian artist Alexander Ponomarev (b. 1957). Sea Stories will unveil a series of new and recent works by the artist, most of which have never been exhibited before in the UK.

Drawing upon a background in nautical engineering and an early career as a submariner, Ponomarev uses his Sea voyages as a starting point to explore relationships between illusion and reality, technology and art, mythology and documentary as a way of understanding the shifting tides of personal and cultural history which are particularly relevant to a contemporary Russian experience.

His work often takes the form of epic aquatic installations which display a performative engagement with remote seas and Arctic terrain but he also produces smaller more intimate pieces, often placing himself within the frame so that the scale and context of the ocean is magnified. What comes across in all of Ponomarev's work is a sense of playfulness underlined by his deep respect for the sea and the strange underwater world he has chosen to spend so much of his life engaging with.

The works in Sea Stories arise from some of the many oceanic journeys undertaken by the artist including expeditions to the North Pole, deep sea submarining and the tracking of the 60th latitude of the Atlantic whilst onboard a scientific research ship.

A centrepiece of this exhibition is the UK debut of the impressive installation piece Base (2003). Originally created during a residency at the studio of sculptor Alexander Calder, a nine-metres-long horizontal tube filled with water forms a tunnel for the movement of a black submarine. Rising above the water on propellers, the submarine performs a chameleon - like transformation, revealing brightly coloured markings that are a far cry from the camouflage usually associated with such naval vessels.

In this work the artist reprises the recurring metaphor of the submarine that populates his practice. For Ponomarev, the submarine is employed as a symbol that links art to war, while also signalling the issue of surface and hidden depths, and the fraught relationship between appearance and disappearance.

Sea Stories also features moving image works, drawings and photographs documenting further artistic adventures from far flung corners of the ocean. Films presented include Heliotropism (2009), created onboard a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic and Maya: A Lost Island (2000), which documents a strange but wonderful collaboration with the 5th fleet of the Russian Navy, who were persuaded to lay a smokescreen in front of the island of Sedioyatyl, thus causing its entire landmass gradually to disappear and become momentarily invisible. The exhibition also unveils a new series of self-portraits by the artist. Deep Water Graphics (2010) was created in the arctic and the images were gradually distorted by subjection to water-pressure at depths of up to 4km below sea-level.

Alexander Ponomarev, whose father was a hero of the battle of Stalingrad, graduated from the USSR Nautical Engineering College in 1979 following a period at Oriel Art School. He then spent several decades working for the Russian navy, taking his mariners oath and sailing the seven seas before illness forced a return to land. Art was his salvation allowing him to combine his passion for the sea and technological expertise with artistic exploration that would encompass a homage to Leonardo Da Vinci - the great figurehead of scientific and artistic marriage. When not crossing oceans he's most at home in France. In 2007, he was named an Officier des Arts et des Lettres by France's Minister of Culture.

Recent solo exhibitions include:
'Subtiziano', collateral event at the 53rd International Art Exhibition Venice Biennale/ Biennale di Venezia (2009); 'Faire Surface', MNMN (Monaco National Musee Nouveau); Culture Project, New York; Punto di vista Nina Lumer, Milan (all 2008); 'Verticale parallele' Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpetriere; National Center of Contemporary Art, Festival d'Automne, Paris; 52nd International Art Exhibition Venice Biennale / Biennale di Venezia; 'Secret Fairway' special project of the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; 'In the Garden of Wolf Packs', installation in the Tuilleries Fountain, Louvre, Paris (all 2007); Multimedia Complex of Actual Arts, in conjunction with the 1st Moscow Biennale (2005); 'Alexander Ponomarev,' TNT Center, Bordeaux, France (2004).

Recent group exhibitions include:
Krasnoyarsk Biennale of Contemporary Art; 'New Angilarium', Museum of Modern Art, Moscow; 'I Believe', Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, in conjunction with the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (all 2007); 'ARS 06. Sense of the Real', Kiasma Nykytaiteen Musee, Helsinki (2006); 'Under the Bridges-2', Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg; 'Alexander Ponomarev, Video,' firstRun, art media festival, Ivri, France (all 2005).

In the exhibition A Few Works from Ai Wei Wei, various materials, such as wood, tea, metal, or dust, tell various stories.

The video work Barely Something (2009) shows the names of 4851 schoolchildren who died in the earthquake in Sichuan (2008) in the ruins of their school buildings.

Ai Wei Wei: "Even dust can tell a story... If in the future architecture should be more about human dignity and humanity, then we have to learn to interpret the traces in the ruins properly. Then we will learn why the architecture that we thought was secure and that was supposed to protect us from the calamities of nature collapsed within seconds and destroyed so many human lives."

For the large format sculpture Dust to Dust, the artist also uses dust as his main material. Ai Wei Wei crushed pots and other vessels from the Neolithic Period, and then placed the fine powder into 30 glass vessels that he lined up in a shelf-like arrangement.

With the 2009 work Teahouse (180 x 120 x 180 cm), first shown at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum, the artist touches on questions of architecture in the context of nature. Using 432 cubes of pressed pu-erh tea, he constructed a sculpture of a house reduced to the outer surfaces standing in a fragrant field of tea, strongly reminiscent of Japanese Zen gardens.

The sculpture China Log, 340 centimeters in length, is made using the "iron wood" from the dismantled columns of temples from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). The elements are arranged to leave behind an empty space shaped like the outlines of China (including Taiwan).

The exhibition, the artist's first solo show in Berlin, includes a total of 16 artworks from the years 1995 to 2009. This is the artist's first solo exhibition in Berlin.

On October 12, 2010, the exhibition The Unilveer Series: Ai Weiwei will begin at London's Tate Modern. The artist will have further exhibitions at Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing - Lucerne, Switzerland, and Galerie Christine König, Vienna, Austria.

'The experience of life in a finite, limited body is specifically for the purpose of discovering and manifesting supernatural, infinite existence within the finite.' Pythagoras

For his first solo exhibition in Europe, LA-based artist Matt Johnson will present four major new sculptures, each utilising and departing from the canons of figurative representation - the head, the bust, and the reclining figure. Riffing on the gamut of sculptural styles, from primitivism to romanticism, abstraction to postmodernism and realism, the exhibition reveals a subtly spiritual yet contemplatively humorous attitude, which suffuses Johnson's practice and offers both a celebration and interrogation of the history of art, and the space between our terrestrial surroundings and their attachments to a larger metaphysical structure.

Johnson's characteristically wry eye for ironic marriages of physical matter and subject material is immediately manifested in the assembled works. Odalisque for instance assumes the aspect of a larger-than-life reclining figure that on first encounter appears to be made from modelling clay, suggesting a monumental study for an even more momentous sculpture. In a typically deft sleight of hand, however, the sculpture is no rough draft but is indeed the finished article, created in bronze. With Grotesque at Prayer, surface appearance again belies material reality, as the original foil model for the meteoric bust, seemingly lightweight and disposable, has been realised in sculpture as stainless steel. Beekeeper partially achieves its sense of narrative potential through the contrast of sandstone and bronze, the primal head carved from elemental stone capped, seemingly insensibly, with metallic bees, while American Spirit, the final work in the exhibition, turns the traditional weighty concerns of sculptors on their heads, with an investigation into what meaning weightlessness can carry.

The exhibition offers insights not only into the artist's coolly irreverent attitude to the stuff of object making, but also presents narrative suggestions that range across both the historical and fantastical possibilities of sculpture. Odalisque - the title of which refers to the female slave attendants of the Ottoman Imperial Harem and one of the emblematic tropes of erotic and mysterious constructions of the Orient in the nineteenth century - is a fleshy, robust figure, one which alludes provocatively and ambiguously to the uses to which the figurative sculpture has been put in its history. Grotesque at Prayer, despite its titular reference to devotional traditions of art and the representational allusion to a shrouded face fixed in a devotional gesture, seems also somewhat extra-terrestrial in its jagged angularity, as evocative of something alien as it is suggestive of the Almighty. The solid monolithic authority of the Beekeeper is playfully complicated by the colony of bees whose collective presence is as imposing as the individual head on which they rest. American Spirit represents something of a departure from the iconic figurative works assembled in the main exhibition, offering as it does an object pointing towards an allusive more transcendental meaning of humanness. It shares with the other sculptures however a certain sardonic sensibility, as the packet of cigarettes floats and spins, hypnotically at the end of the transept-like space, inviting questions about the spirit, awe, and the awesome.

Matt Johnson was born in New York in 1978, and trained in the New York Studio Program, NY, Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD, and the University of California Los Angeles, CA. Solo presentations include an exhibition at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA (2006); and Super System at Taxter & Spengemann, New York, NY (2009). Key groups shows include Thing: New Sculptures from Los Angeles at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2005); Uncertain States of America - American Art in the 3rd Millennium, at Astrup Fearnley, Oslo, Norway (2005; travelled to Bard College, New York, NY; Serpentine Gallery, London, UK; Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland; Herning Art Museum, Herning, Denmark; CCA Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland; Le Musée de Sérignan, Sérignan, France; Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic; Songzhuan Art Center, Beijing, China); and Abstract America at The Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (2008). Matt Johnson lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

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Coming Next

October 13-14 Photography, Film & Video
October 20-21 Painting & Drawing
October 27-28 Mixed/ Multi Media
November 3-4 Sculpture & Installation

Autumn / Fall schedule now available.


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