Olaf Nicolai

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Olaf Nicolai at the opening of his work of art "Monument for a Forgotten Future" at Emscherkunst.2010

Olaf Nicolai (* 1962 in Halle an der Saale ) is a German artist who works from a conceptual approach with a wide variety of media .

Life

Nicolai grew up in Karl-Marx-Stadt, today Chemnitz . His brother is the musician Carsten Nicolai .

From 1983 to 1988, Olaf Nicolai studied German with a subsequent doctorate at the University of Leipzig . The topic of his doctoral thesis entitled Gesture between Expression and Calculus. The poetics of the Wiener Gruppe , in which he examined the tension between forms of expression and their strategic implementation, can also be found in his own artistic work. Since the beginning of the 1990s, he has been present with group and solo exhibitions in almost all important places in the contemporary art scene. Olaf Nicolai was represented at Documenta X (1997) as well as at the Venice Biennials 49 and 51 (2001 and 2005). He has received several grants, including that of the Villa Massimo in Rome (1998). In 1996 he was awarded the Botho-Graef Award and the 1999 Bremer Art Award and in 2002 he was awarded the art prize Young city looks young art of the city of Wolfsburg excellent. Nicolai received the Karl Sczuka Prize in 2017 for his work, In The Woods There Is A Bird ... , which was realized together with Frank Bretschneider . In May 2018 he received the Wilhelm Loth Prize of the City of Darmstadt .

Olaf Nicolai has been Professor of Sculpture and Basics of Three-Dimensional Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 2011 .

Olaf Nicolai is a member of the German Association of Artists . He lives and works in Berlin- Prenzlauer Berg .

plant

Memorial to those persecuted by Nazi military justice in Vienna

The artist works with a wide variety of materials. He creates artificial landscape spaces, enlarges consumer objects into gigantic dimensions and works with alienated advertising graphics. Repetition is an important working principle, on the one hand, familiar motifs are placed in new contexts, on the other, Nicolai is concerned with repeating images from memory.

The artist works conceptually insofar as he researches questions of the natural sciences and humanities and tries to make them tangible in an aesthetically constructed and thus new context; the contrast between nature and art, or between naturalness and artificiality, is often in the foreground. With his intellectual approach, the artist aims at an everyday world that is thoroughly familiar to the viewer, the perception of which he controls in his works; only rarely does expression gain the upper hand over calculation.

In his pictures of nature or landscapes, nature, like culture, is only present as an art product. For example, he created a landscape as an interior for Documenta X. A kind of bonsai mountain world sprout on manageable boulders - spread around the room. Behind this dismantled nature, on the wallpaper on the wall, the vegetation had frozen into ornament. The tape produced virtual naturalistic birdsong.

In several works the artist confronts “ socialist ideals directly with their declared enemy image, the capitalist market economy, and thus formulates an ambivalence and contradiction between socially utopian, pragmatic-political, consumerist and aesthetic aspects .” (Exhibition announcement - Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig) In Lenin: 8 square meters , the reference to the socialist idea of ​​the redistribution of private property stands in opposition to the shimmering sequin fabric borrowed from capitalist luxury. The name Lenin , a symbol for social utopias and change, can be used to designate any product. In the work Die Flamme der Revolution, lying (in Wolfsburg) (2002) Nicolai refers to a sculpture of the GDR - monumental art from his hometown Halle / Saale from the year 1967. He transformed the 24 meter high concrete sculpture composed of hyperbolic shells as a miniaturization of the West German city of Wolfsburg, which is itself a symbol for capitalist production, and turned it to the left on the floor. In this way, the former symbol of socialism inscribed itself self-explanatory in a contemporary capitalist exploitation logic.

In 2010, the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover showed his works with the title Faites le travail qu'accomplit le soleil , including a multi-surface, reflecting sculpture under the glass dome of the exhibition house.

In 2011, the Escalier du Chant performance series took place in the stairwell of the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich , for which 12 composers each composed songs on current political events.

Deserters monument in Vienna

In the 2012 competition announced by the City of Vienna for a memorial for those persecuted by Nazi military justice in Vienna, Nicolai was the first to win. His design for the memorial on Ballhausplatz was officially unveiled on October 24, 2014 by Federal President Heinz Fischer . It consists of an X-shaped staircase sculpture that can be walked on and the repeating inscription "all alone", which is taken from a poem by the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay .

The Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main is showing the sculpture Shutter's Lullaby / Ellipse for Städel from 2012 in the Nicolais sculpture garden .

In 2020 Nicolai set up a Museum as Bureau of Communication in the Museo d'Arte Contemporaneo di Roma ; In this way, the digital museum visitor can send texts to an addressee of his choice by email. Curators, in turn, select a suitable image motif from the museum's holdings depending on the text. In this curatorial practice of postcards on demand - in contrast to the classic postcard - the image creates a relationship to the texts.

Literature / catalogs

  • Petra Gördüren, Dirk Luckow (Eds.): Dopplereffekt. Pictures in Art and Science , Kunsthalle zu Kiel , January 31 to May 2, 2010. DuMont Buchverlag, Kiel 2010, ISBN 978-3-8321-9295-2
  • Olaf Nicolai: "Show Case"; Institute for Modern Art Nuremberg, ISBN 3-933096-21-9
  • Olaf Nicolai: "The Blondes"; Artimo, Amsterdam, 2005
  • Olaf Nicolai: "Rewind - Forward"; Hatje Cantz 2003.
  • Olaf Nicolai: “Enjoy / Survive”; The Gestalten Verlag , 2001
  • Olaf Nicolai: "30 colors"; Salon Verlag 2000
  • Olaf Nicolai: “Still life”; Berlin 1999/2000
  • Wolfgang Träger u. a .: plateau of humanity. 49th Venice Biennale . In: kunstforum international vol. 156, 2001; P. 135

Public collections

Web links

Commons : Olaf Nicolai  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. ↑ "It all started in Frankfurt": memories of 1990. In: faz.net. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, January 24, 2005, accessed on March 12, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Petra Gördüren, Dirk Luckow (Ed.): Dopplereffekt. Pictures in Art and Science , Kunsthalle zu Kiel January 31 to May 2, 2010. DuMont Buchverlag, Kiel 2010, p. 239.
  3. ↑ Concept and media artist Olaf Nicolai receives the Wilhelm Loth Prize of the City of Science Darmstadt 2018. In: www.darmstadt.de. February 15, 2018, accessed February 23, 2018 .
  4. ^ Olaf Nicolai class. In: www.adbk.de (Akademi der Bildenden Künste München). Retrieved March 19, 2018 .
  5. ↑ kuenstlerbund.de: Members "N" / Olaf Nicolai (accessed on November 25, 2015).
  6. ↑ Le Monde diplomatique No. 7131, from August 15, 2003, reproduced by Galerie Eigen and Art in March 2007.
  7. ^ Gallery for Contemporary Art Leipzig, The future is not what it used to be, 2004/2005
  8. ↑ Song descending the stairs in FAZ of November 3, 2011, page 34.
  9. ↑ http: //www.österreich.at/nachrichten/Entwurf-des-Deserteurs-Denkmal-praesentiert/108590901 .
  10. ↑ diepresse.com - Blue X as a late honor for deserters . Article dated October 24, 2014, accessed October 25, 2014.
  11. ^ Süddeutsche Zeitung: Postcards on demand. Retrieved May 23, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Nicolai, Olaf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German artist
DATE OF BIRTH 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH Halle on the Saale