Olaf Holzapfel
15 Feb - 23 Mar 2013
OLAF HOLZAPFEL
interritorial und territōriālis
15 February - 23 March 2013
Albert Baronian is pleased to announce the first exhibition of German artist Olaf Holzapfel (1969, Gölitz, GDR) at the gallery. Entitled “interritorial und territōriālis” the exhibition presents two type of new works that can be characterized as Hay Pictures [Heubilder] and Foldings [Faltungen].
Holzapfel’s Faltungen are made of materials such as PVC, polycarebonate or acrylic and are produced in close co-operation with his studio assistants. The basis of each work is a flat-surface piece of synthetic material− a module,so to say − that is heated in the oven and is, for the duration of a few mintues, shapeable. For this period of time, Holzapfel develops a kind of choreography (previously tried and tested with paper), in which every person involved performs a step in the temporarally sequential chain of action which finally leads to the folding. What remains in the end is the cold, an hence static, object. A two-dimenstional module becomes a three-dimensional thing, which is habitually presented on a table-like pedestal. The table stands for “work” and “action” just as does the object located on it – the ration of original material, work invested and final product being established via the human beings and their individual capacities. The “human dimension” and chance – traditional factors in art history to some degree – give Holzapfel’s works their accordingly incalculable form.
Similar forces come into play with the Hay Pictures: their production takes place in temporally sequential steps at a variety of geographical sites. First of all, farmers in the Lower Silesian/ Greater Poland border region between Poland and Germany twist straw to form sturdy ropes, employing a cultural technique well-established in the region. Understood as a principle of serial labout, the technique, working on the organic mateirality of the hay, introduces a priori a natural degree of deviation into the ropes so created, which are subsequently supplied to Holzapfel’s studio. There, they are woven by the artist and his assistants around or into a prepared stretcherframe and are subsequently sometimes coated in coloured India ink. These are two processes, following on from one another and informed by the minimaliost cred of “one thing after another” (Donald Judd) – two distinct production rhythms, each stoic and monotonous in itself, that congeal into a form of picture or image. All this reminds one of the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti, best known for his Mappe – knitted maps of the world made of national flags and which he produces from 1971 onwards with the help of women knitter from Afghanistan. Like Holzapfel, he too carries over a regional craft into the context of contemporary art: yet while Boetti’s work reveal tge fractures in the blurring and slurring of a global system of identification with regional interpretations, Holzapfel’s work stand rather, in an exemplary manner, for the simultaneity of the haptic and virtual realities in our day-to-day worlds – realities that are today rapidly drifting apart.
Martin Germann
Excerpt from Germann, M. (2012) In a Rockscape. Works by Olaf Holzapfel 2006-2012. In: Olaf Holzapfel - Region [Leonhardi-Museum Dresden, 22 September-30 December 2012] Berlin: DISTANZ Verlag GmbH, pp. 105-109
interritorial und territōriālis
15 February - 23 March 2013
Albert Baronian is pleased to announce the first exhibition of German artist Olaf Holzapfel (1969, Gölitz, GDR) at the gallery. Entitled “interritorial und territōriālis” the exhibition presents two type of new works that can be characterized as Hay Pictures [Heubilder] and Foldings [Faltungen].
Holzapfel’s Faltungen are made of materials such as PVC, polycarebonate or acrylic and are produced in close co-operation with his studio assistants. The basis of each work is a flat-surface piece of synthetic material− a module,so to say − that is heated in the oven and is, for the duration of a few mintues, shapeable. For this period of time, Holzapfel develops a kind of choreography (previously tried and tested with paper), in which every person involved performs a step in the temporarally sequential chain of action which finally leads to the folding. What remains in the end is the cold, an hence static, object. A two-dimenstional module becomes a three-dimensional thing, which is habitually presented on a table-like pedestal. The table stands for “work” and “action” just as does the object located on it – the ration of original material, work invested and final product being established via the human beings and their individual capacities. The “human dimension” and chance – traditional factors in art history to some degree – give Holzapfel’s works their accordingly incalculable form.
Similar forces come into play with the Hay Pictures: their production takes place in temporally sequential steps at a variety of geographical sites. First of all, farmers in the Lower Silesian/ Greater Poland border region between Poland and Germany twist straw to form sturdy ropes, employing a cultural technique well-established in the region. Understood as a principle of serial labout, the technique, working on the organic mateirality of the hay, introduces a priori a natural degree of deviation into the ropes so created, which are subsequently supplied to Holzapfel’s studio. There, they are woven by the artist and his assistants around or into a prepared stretcherframe and are subsequently sometimes coated in coloured India ink. These are two processes, following on from one another and informed by the minimaliost cred of “one thing after another” (Donald Judd) – two distinct production rhythms, each stoic and monotonous in itself, that congeal into a form of picture or image. All this reminds one of the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti, best known for his Mappe – knitted maps of the world made of national flags and which he produces from 1971 onwards with the help of women knitter from Afghanistan. Like Holzapfel, he too carries over a regional craft into the context of contemporary art: yet while Boetti’s work reveal tge fractures in the blurring and slurring of a global system of identification with regional interpretations, Holzapfel’s work stand rather, in an exemplary manner, for the simultaneity of the haptic and virtual realities in our day-to-day worlds – realities that are today rapidly drifting apart.
Martin Germann
Excerpt from Germann, M. (2012) In a Rockscape. Works by Olaf Holzapfel 2006-2012. In: Olaf Holzapfel - Region [Leonhardi-Museum Dresden, 22 September-30 December 2012] Berlin: DISTANZ Verlag GmbH, pp. 105-109