Andreas Slominski

Andreas Slominski

11 September - 16 October 1999

His sly wit and prankster behavior mask an undercurrent of serious cultural criticism...

...rich and complex art...

- Nancy Spector, curator,
Guggenheim Museum, New York


The German artist Andreas Slominski's first one-person exhibition in New York provides an opportunity to see his diabolical animal traps and absurdly counter-intuitive actions that have been presented in many European art venues since the late 80s.

Slominski's traps can be crude and brutal like the Trap for Birds of Prey or deceptively charming and crafty like the Rat Trap in the form of a church. Inviting metaphor, the traps suggest the obsessed backwoods trapper, the kitschy handmade garden ornament or the nasty business of pest control.

Slominski's actions, episodic processes of excessive difficulty and comic contrivance, reference formal sculpture and result in a physical art work of some kind. The visitor to the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany, saw Slominski's piece titled Golf Ball, ostensibly a lone golf ball sitting on the floor of the museum. Getting the ball in place, however, required a crane to lift a dump truck over the roof of the museum to the back of the building; a local golfer to hit a ball over the front of the museum and into the dump truck so that it would roll off the truck and through the previously removed glass window of the museum. Then the glass was replaced, the truck and crane removed, the golfer departed, leaving only the inanimate golf ball. Slominski's actions, absurd, ironic and humorous as they may be, possess a poignancy and dumb purity and reflect on the serious accommodation granted to art and artists.

Andreas Slominski was born in Meppen, Germany in 1959 and lives in Hamburg. His work has been the subject of one-person museum shows at Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Museum fur Modern Kunst in Frankfurt, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunsthalle ZŸrich, Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht and Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld and at galleries including Produzentengalerie in Hamburg, White Cube in London, Jablonka Galerie in Koln and Wako in Tokyo. The magazine Parkett featured his work in the Summer 1999 issue.