Olaf Holzapfel

Olaf Holzapfel’s exhibition ‘REGION’ at the Leonhardi Museum in Dresden explores the multifaceted relationships between regional landscapes, materials and the techniques that have emerged from them.
He presents two groups of works created using traditional techniques: on the one hand, a series of geometric, woven hay figures that allude both to the general theme of rural life and to the Sorbian passion for abstract patterns in traditional costume. The other is a group of sculptural wooden constructions that explore the formal language of half-timbered architecture. For Holzapfel, these wooden constructions represent more than just a practical, traditional canon of forms: they demonstrate a way of describing the world through a linear model that is reduced to the essentials and visually comprehensible within its context. The wooden sculptures draw on applied architecture of the kind found in rich variety in Lusatia and the Ore Mountains, and which, in their distinctive character, reveal knowledge of the respective climatic and topographical conditions.
The exhibition also constitutes a contemporary dialogue between Olaf Holzapfel and other artists from the Dresden region who, in their own time and following close observation, responded to their circumstances; including Eduard Leonhardi himself, the photography pioneer Hermann Krone, the Constructivist Hermann Glöckner, and Curt Querner, an early exponent of New Objectivity, who later found his subjects in the everyday life of his home town, Börnchen.

‘The landscape and the use of materials: the actual subject of this unsentimental dialogue, which spans generations and is shaped by divergent worldviews, could therefore well be the age-old, ever-relevant “question of technology”. And the modern Western mind, with all its dogmatic narrow-mindedness and its outdated belief in the Cartesian division between nature and culture, must learn to reformulate this question anew, to ask it of itself once more, in a newly awakened awareness that this so-called ‘question of technology’ is also always a question of nature – or rather, one to which nature itself can, in part, provide the answer. Olaf Holzapfel’s work, made of hay, wood, epoxy and ink, helps to give nature a voice.’
(Dieter Roelstraete in the exhibition catalogue )

Dr Carina Plath spoke at the opening on Friday, 21 September 2012.

We would like to thank the SLUB Dresden, the Hermann Krone Collection of the TU Dresden, the TU Bergakademie Freiberg, the Kulturzentrum Schleife and Fischer Kunsthandel & Edition Berlin, among others, for loans.