Johannes Vogl brings real-world objects, functions and accidents into the gallery space. His transformations often have a narrative, even a performative aspect. Memory is a constant theme of his work: the domain of personal experience often shades implicitly or explicitly into the political.

Shelf (2011) is the meticulous re-assembling of a found object, or more precisely of a found event: a collapsed rotten old wooden shelf-unit, including the fifty-year-old glass jars full of fruit preserves that once stood on it. The Night (2010) uses an ancient slide-projector, onto which a pendulum mechanism has been grafted, to project a small disc of light which moves gradually in an arc across the wall; vintage technology transforms the gallery space into a romanticised 'moonlit' environment. Albert (2011) presents two versions of an old photograph of a family member, taken when he was a boy. In the first photograph, he wears a uniform of the Nazi era. In the second, in order to make the photo fit for display after the war, the uniform has been painted over by a sailor costume. The frames hint at a further twist: the frame on the older photograph, in which the boy is shown in Nazi-era costume, is in fact newer than the frame on the over-painted photo, suggesting a shift in the contemporary attitude to the Nazi past: "it's over"?

Johannes Vogl was born in 1981 in Kaufbeuren. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe, 2002-5; at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, 2005-7; at the Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin-Weissensee, 2007-8; at the University of the Arts Berlin, (UDK) 2008-9. His work may be seen soon in On Destruction, Swiss Institute, New York/USA, 2011.