Edited by Studio Olaf Holzapfel
Texts by Andrea Elías, Inka Gressel, Teresa Gutiérrez
Publisher BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE
February 2021
English/German/Spanish
24,5 x 30,5 cm, 128 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-3-96436-002-1
€ 35.00
via Bom Dia Books
Edited by Galia Bar Or, Hans Günter Golinski
Text by Galia Bar Or
The Rough Law of Gardens documents Olaf Holzapfel and Nahum Tevet’s eponymous joint exhibition and explores the intergenerational differences between two unique artists. Both artists’ work rejects the global logic of growth and traverses the bounds of sculpture and painting: each of their practices involves ideas to do with materiality, learning, and memory. Rather than a conventional two-person show, “The Rough Law of Gardens,” was a thought process in which aspects of work by one artist were developed, exaggerated, but also inversed, or simply ignored in the work of the other. The exhibition did not pretend to render the affinity between the combined selections of works necessary. Instead, it raised questions regarding the relationship, or lack thereof, between the two art practices in order to reflect on the artists’ connection with or isolation from the historical circumstances and social realities in which they come.
“The Rough Law of Gardens” was concurrently shown in 2015 at the Kunstmuseum in Bochum, Germany, and the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel.
Copublished with Kunstmuseum Bochum, Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod
Design by Michal Sahar
April 2017, English
16.8 x 23.5 cm, 82 pages, 4 b/w and 40 color ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-259-5
€15.00
Elementare Hausformen in wandelbarer Landschaft
Die weitläufige Landschaft Patagoniens – des Südens von Chile – und die von den Siedlern vorgenommen Umwandlungen sind Gegenstand dieses Buches. Der deutsche Künstler Olaf Holzapfel (geb. 1969 in Dresden, lebt und arbeitet in Berlin) und der chilenische Künstler Sebastián Preece (geb. 1972 in Santiago de Chile, lebt und arbeitet in Santiago de Chile) haben sich in der Weite des unbestimmten Raumes, ohne natürliche oder Besitzgrenzen, für eine bestimmte Zeit eingerichtet. In mehreren site-specific projects erforschten die Künstler die Lebensweise im extremen Süden Chiles. Sie haben hier aus Holz Tore, Zäune, Unterstände und Häuser errichtetet, die sich als flexible und minimalistische Grundgebilde für die Raumnahme erweisen. Die Installationen erarbeiteten sie mit ansässigen Bauern und ortsüblichen Werkzeugen in unterschiedlichen Techniken und Bauweisen in der Region rund um Aysén. So stellt sich eine Übergangssituation ein, in der Handlungen, Arbeit, Wege und Kommunikation den Inhalt des Raumes definieren.
Texts by Francisco Brugnoli and Paz Guevara and a detailed essay by Gustavo Boldrini Pardos on the settlement history of Patagonia.
Editor: Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Facultad de Artes, Universidad de Chile
Sprache: German/English/Spanish
Format: 17 × 24 cm
176 Seiten, ungefähr 100 Farbabbildungen, Softcover mit Klappen
ISBN978-3-95476-065-7
September 2014
29,90 €
Edited by Lindenau-Museum Altenburg
Text by Jennifer Allen
Olaf Holzapfel’s work proves the indissoluble connection between human settlement, technique, and abstraction. Elementary space-generating methods like plaiting, weaving, and latticing—age-old settler techniques—stem from natural linear entities. These techniques are exceptional in that they don’t differentiate between technique or machine, or whether a structure is purely functional, for living, or auxiliary. Holzapfel scrutinizes the perception and presence of material within space and whether an image discourse can exist without these physical modules. For him the landscape, and the material it contains, is more than a symbol that fixes identity; rather, it becomes a transmitter.
Holzapfel’s exhibition at the Lindenau-Museum Altenburg, on occasion of being awarded the Gerhard-Altenbourg Prize 2014, explores the interstices between craft and art, and consequently, between orality and literacy. Much of his work presented in this catalogue—framework installations, hay images, and straw images are displayed in this book—was made together with farmers and craftspeople; by transforming age-old handiwork into contemporary art, Holzapfel unsettles the division between nature and culture, and tradition and modernity.
Design by Studio Manuel Raeder
February 2015, English/German
23 x 31 cm, 104 pages, 55 color ill., hardcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-091-1
€28.00
23 x 31 cm, 104 pages, 55 color ill., hardcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-091-1
The land surrounds the city; it is its shell, its mirror, its source, its Other. Rural activities are not secondary or pre-modern but are of equal importance to what we understand as the contemporary, often urban center. After a decade of focusing on virtual spaces and their interplay with public space, Olaf Holzapfel (born 1969 in Görlitz, lives and works in Berlin and Dresden) addresses the relationship between technology and nature. His works explore the transformation of the material into technology, beginning with the originally rural, agricultural aspects for people.
With a series of new half-timbered sculptures, Olaf Holzapfel describes space as a linear model, adaptable and contemporary. A wooden timbered structure can be modified, rebuilt and reimagined. This publication presents a group of sculptural wooden constructions that engage with the formal language of half-timbering. In contrast to these wooden sculptures, the artist presents a series of geometrically woven straw figures. These artifacts, crafted using traditional techniques, refer to the motif of rural life and to abstract patterns found in traditional costumes.
The works mark a distinct minimalism. Both series are also placed in a contemporary dialogue with other artists from the Dresden region who responded to their time: the landscape painter Eduard Leonhardi, the photography pioneer Hermann Krone, the constructivist Hermann Glöckner, and Curt Querner, an early representative of New Objectivity.
Texts by Martin Germann, Peter Lang and Dieter Roelstraete.
Editor: Leonhardi-Museum Dresden, Bernd Heise
Sprache: Deutsch/Englisch
Format: 22 × 26 cm
112 Seiten, ungefähr 70 Farbabbildungen, Softcover, Schutzumschlag
ISBN 978-3-942405-97-3
Januar 2013, 29,90 €
Text by Andreas Spiegl
Nakano Sakaue documents a series of photographs realized by Olaf Holzapfel during a residency in Tokyo. The artist has depicted a kind of residue from the city’s buildings: neon lights, images, and street signs, which are featured as so many promises for orientation. Most prominent are the signs that guide the blind: they are markings in the ground, forming a guidance system that can be felt by a blind person’s cane. As a rule, the marks are long, yellow grooves or dotted surfaces that inform whether a route continues or changes direction. These marks constitute a city within the city, the markings of an unseen city in the midst of the visible city.
Holzapfel’s attention is drawn precisely to this motif: at the intersection of visible and invisible, a system of coordinates exists for a visual concept that uses the discernible to discuss the imperceptible. According to the author Andreas Spiegl, the artist’s pictures “offer both vision and a view that is searching for orientation. In this sense, they represent both images and maps alike. They show specific situations, and allude to an abstraction that liberates itself from place in order to point to the imaginary. Seeing the imaginary, the eye moves through the image to return to the coordinates of perception itself. The geography that Holzapfel sketches with this atlas describes perception as a territory—the view of the visible and the imaginary, as a city, appears anywhere the relationship of each to the other can be seen.”
Design by Surface, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin
2009, English/German
22 x 27.5 cm, 112 pages, 15 b/w and 53 color ill., hardcover
ISBN 978-1-933128-65-8
€29.00