Exhibition: DEPTH AND SURFACE. Scientific Tableaux in Dialogue with Olaf Holzapfel

Opening hours: Tue - Sun, 11 am - 6 pm

Knowledge Production in Art, Technology, and Research: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Works by artist Olaf Holzapfel interact with ‘object-tableaux’ from the TUD Dresden University of Technology`s teaching and research collections

The starting point of the exhibition ‘DEPTH AND SURFACE’ are the 40 academic teaching and research collections in the possession of TUD Dresden University of Technology and Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. These collections include models, teaching boards, display cases, and objects from other genres made or collected over the past two hundred years for specific didactic purposes. The focus of scientific ‘object-tableaux’ is not a single object. Rather, the point is to visualise processes of creation and production, of logics and causalities, and to make them comprehensible in a historical and didactic context.

If and where the collective object memory between art, engineering and natural science, crafts and private enterprise is depicted in the mirror of incipient industrialisation and against the backdrop of the establishment of individual collections in museums, the ‘object-tableau’ uniquely manifests the beginning of modernity in the early 19th century.

In combination with these ‘object-tableaux’, groups of works created by Olaf Holzapfel (born 1967 in Dresden, situated in Berlin) and arranged especially for this project will be presented in the ‘Oktogon’ Art Gallery of the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. The ensemble is conceived as a complementary production which illuminates from several perspectives both the tableau as a form of order and display as well as Holzapfel's artistic reference to it. In this way, significant interconnections between artistic and scientific object cultures from the 19th century to the present day are made visible. Next to sculptures, paintings, works made from natural materials (such as the ‘hay pictures’), and models from the past 20 years, Holzapfel also shows a new framework construction. Its encounter with historical ‘object-tableaux’ opens up new perspectives on the ‘space in-between’—a concept which, to Holzapfel's mind, connects the present-day living spaces with time, people, nature, and things.

more information about the exhibition