Galerie im Taxispalais

Olaf Holzapfel

The Nomadic Criterion

The exhibition “Das nomadische Kriterium” (“The Nomadic Criterion”) shows installations, sculptures, and photographs of a lebenswelt that is constantly on the go. Shaped by the simultaneity of extremely diverse spaces and realities, the connecting element is their language. Olaf Holzapfel, based in Berlin, belongs to a new generation of fine artists discovering and defining these spaces of transition, seeking the simple substantial moment in the daily life of this transformative life. How does one move through architectural spaces in megacities, how does one navigate through cyberspace, what are the connections like, which signals and signs guide our perception?

The artist works on these themes with a unique, condensed, intensified, and conceptual pictorial language. The convergence of various levels of reality that we move between on a daily basis takes place in his work in a specific, fuzzy interstitial space and clarifies the flowing transitions from a flat, symbolic world into space and vice versa. In doing so, he also questions the image we have of our body, both the internal and external perception, which we often feel simultaneously. Holzapfel’s sculptures are made of acrylic glass, sheet metal, and soft plastics. Their frozen folds and deformations render them hybrid beings, between organic and geometric structures. His installations made of fiberboard, interlaced and tied together, construct unstable architectures and dwellings.

The focus of the exhibition in Galerie im Taxispalais, which is the artist’s first presentation in Austria, is the installation “Unterschlupf” (“shelter”). Olaf Holzapfel designed the matrix-like, rural form specifically for the spaces and in reference to Innsbruck. It fits into a series of works in which he deals with temporary squatter architectures and spatial matrixes. Beginning with virtual space as status quo, penetrating all areas of life, he creates physical equivalents with his works. In the exhibition they make their appearance as sculptural “domes” lined up one after the other, which lend expression to contemporary nomadic existence by borrowing from hippy architecture and its universalistic spatial ideas, and at the same time, function as an abstract model for social cooperation. Further sculptures with titles such as “Passant” (“passerby”) or “Aufenthalt” (“stay”) pose questions about the mutual dependence of (physical and mental) movement, static form and the perception of time.

Counterparts to this are large format digital images—“Archives”—with overlapping grid patterns. The moment of simultaneity allows discontinuous, mysterious pictorial spaces to arise, which refer to processes such as the exchange of goods and information, and saving and transfer, and open up conceptual spaces between emptiness and superabundance. Olaf Holzapfel’s works are anchored immediately in the present and are linked with explosive questions, as his photo series “Nakano Sakaue” vividly depicts, in which he pursues the symbolic coordinate systems and structures of movement of people in a megapolis.

The exhibition was produced in cooperation with the Kunstmuseum Mülheim an der Ruhr.