Olaf Holzapfel
As an artist born in a country that no longer exists, and whose coming-of-age involved crossing a border between the East-West divide of the Cold War era that is fast becoming a distant memory, Olaf Holzapfel, born in Dresden in 1967, has long been interested in boundaries, demarcations, and frontiers—or, more precisely, in interstitial spaces, what is possible in between. Equally fluent in the languages of sculpture, painting, film, and photography, much of his work rests on the formal negotiation of the interplay between two-dimensional image (or plane) and three-dimensional form (or space), as can be gauged from his tripartite contribution to documenta 14: an open-air sculpture, a display of historical artifacts and architectural models that also encompasses a newly made film, and a series of so-called hay works and straw pictures—all gathered under the overarching title Zaun (Fence, 2017).
—Dieter Roelstraete
