After the first presentation of his works in carlier | gebauer’s project space at the 2008 gallery weekend, we are pleased to present the first large solo exhibition of works by the young Polish painter and sculptor Tomasz Kowalski in Berlin in September 2009. carlier | gebauer will be presenting a comprehensive overview of his new works from Wednesday 9th September at 6 p.m. We would be delighted to welcome you to this vernissage. During the exhibition there will also be a film screening as well as a discussion with the artist; we shall send you a separate invitation to these events in due course.

In Tomasz Kowalski’s new works, central aspects of his earlier oeuvre come together in new groupings. Kowalski continues to call into being a world of miniatures that take on a resonance far beyond their scale; he continues to open up glimpses of a parallel universe, an inner life of things, an organic world, composed of wooden, profoundly matt intertwining colours, beneath the surface of which a “night of reason” (G.W.F.Hegel) seems to be concealed. However, in contrast to his earlier works, Kowalski now forges even further ahead in dissecting his objects by assuming a more and more sculptural understanding of their presence. Using wood, wax, metal and other materials, he molds different sculptural turns emerging from his drawings, silhouettes and paintings, which sometimes materialize as lifesize wax figures, sometimes as seemingly dancing forms out of vaulted metalwire, sometimes millted, wooden bodyparts. All these objects generate a haunting presence in the exhibition space and it always seems to be their direct relation to the body of its beholder, through which these sculptures intensify their painterly counterparts. While the costumed ghosts of the 19^th century seem to pass through the multiformated paintings, drawings and hung objects, like in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice – Through the Looking Glass” within the numerous, their presence in the room appears to be disparately spookily – as if we would have to fear the taking over of ‘our’ world by ‘them’. Kowalski’s new sculptures seem to observe their viewers. One of them is positioned aloof, standing lifesize in an adjoining room, a second one seems to hardly be able to break through the floor of a vitrine; only its hands and face are surfacing. Wax and plasticine are now also coating some of the paintings, on which the imprints of Kowalki’s ghostworld seem to appear in the moment of their breach. In their surfaces, the passage from the wall into the room remains manifest at all moments.