Galerie Tanja Wagner is pleased to present the fifth solo exhibition by artist Angelika J. Trojnarski.
When rain falls on parched soil and plants after days of heat, a unique smell by the name of Petrichor unfurls. As familiar as this scent is to us all, a scent that has become one of Angelika J. Trojnarski’s subjects in this new exhibition, its name, as well as its specific physical origin, are unknown to most. It’s the precarious but no less fascinating sides of our environment that are the overall topic of the artist’s newest works.
Where emphasis has lain previously on the interplay between technology and nature, the focus of her new series shifts solely to landscapes. These are impressive phenomena that the artist has encountered during her scholarship stays in recent years in Texas and Iceland, among others. Trojnarski captures sheet lightning, thunderbolts, extraordinary cloud formations and melting ice bergs through a vigorous and equally sensitive combination of painting and drawing. With glowing reds, warm yellows, electric-radiant blues and poisonously contrasting purple she explores not only static conditions but processes of transformation, the change in the aggregate states of the elements.
This contemporary form of painting stands with art’s long grappling with a nature whose at times overwhelming power was captured in the philospohical aesthetic concept of the sublime in the 18th century, but where that awesome power still experienced a natural origin during the Enlightenment, the meteorology of the present day has long born the stamp of the man-made.
Trojnarski invokes this potential, now in the hands of humanity, in her work Fiat Lux II, a painting that brings together incompatible celestial events: thunderstorm and polar lights at the same time. It would be the equivalent of a perfect storm in which the unlikely meeting of the most exceptional circumstances brings about a total catastrophy. Trojnarski brings not only what could be described, with a certain pathos, as the „wonder of nature“ to fore, but also its conceivable – and perhaps soon to be complete – transience. Images like Mammatus, with its silhouettes of trees at the bottom edge, call to mind burning forests as in the reports from South America and Siberia of late, where trees will soon be overtaken by fields and deserts in turn.
In combining her scientific interest and intitial enthusiasm for optical phenomena Trojnarski stands among artists, who not only show the visible and the human environment in its ambivalence, but through light, color and form teach a sight that recognizes the fragile.
Angelika J. Trojnarski, born 1979 in Mragowo, Poland, studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Class of Andreas Gursky, afore Jörg Immendorff and Markus Lüpertz). She lives and works in Düsseldorf.
2018 she participated in the 100 West Corsicana Residency in Texas and also in the SÍM residency Reykjavik.
Recent solo exhibitions include: KunstHalle am Kulturbahnhof, Cloppenburg (2018); Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin; Julia Ritterskamp, Düsseldorf; Rundstedt Contemporary, Düsseldorf (2017); CentralTrak, Dallas (2016); Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin (2015); Sammlung Frank Vits, Düsseldorf (2014). Her works have been exhibited at Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; Museum Gelsenkirchen (2019); Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2018); Between the Lines, Kunsthaus Essen (2018); DAS ESSZIMMER – Space for art+, Basel; Galerie Tanja Wagner, pop up space in New York (2017); Montagehalle, Berlin; Studio Bronx, Neuss; Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin (2016); Bayer Kulturhaus, Leverkusen; CCA Andraxt, Illes Ballears (2015); Kunsthalle Recklinghausen; Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin (2014); Museum Der Stadt Recklinghausen; KIT Kunst im Tunnel, Düsseldorf (2013); Künstlerhaus Dortmund; Kunsthalle Darmstadt; Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin (2012).