Depth and Surface. Scientific Tableaux in Dialogue with Olaf Holzapfel

The interplay of over 100 scientific object tableaux and artistic works by the internationally renowned Dresden artist Olaf Holzapfel will be presented from September 27 to December 1, 2024, as part of the exhibition Depth and Surface. In Dialogue with Scientific Tableaux and Olaf Holzapfel in the Oktogon, the Art Gallery of the Dresden University of Fine Arts (HfBK Dresden) for the very first time.

What treasures lie hidden in university collections? What do they tell us about the past, present and future of knowledge production in art, technology, and research?

The more than 40 university teaching and research collections of the TUD Dresden University of Technology and the Dresden University of Fine Arts form the starting point for the exhibition Depth and Surface. 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 or scientific teaching and research purposes.

The focus lies on the previously little-illuminated genre of the tableaux: on display boards or cases with arrangements of exhibits. In combination with these historic “object-tableaux”, especially for this project arranged groups of works created by artist Olaf Holzapfel (born in 1967 in Dresden, situated in Berlin) will be presented: foldings, paintings, works made from natural materials (such as the “hay and straw pictures”), and models from the past 20 years, as well as a new framework construction.

Olaf Holzapfel achieved international recognition with his framework constructions as well as hay and straw pictures, which make clear reference to craft techniques. Like no other artist of his generation, Holzapfel thus stands for the urgent examination of cultural practices and social spaces and their changing significance between yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Olaf Holzapfel is particularly interested in the interweaving of artistic and scientific subjects, which he considers in their historical context but at the same time reorganises and contextualises in light of the multi-layered challenges of the present. As viewers, we become part of the artistic “object-tableau”. The outside perspective gives way to a physical immediacy that makes us an active part in the tableau’s structure.

In the Oktogon the wide range of unique “object-tableaux” from more than 15 different scientific disciplines and the associated teaching and research collections, which have never been exhibited together before, unfolds. It ranges from the Herbarium Dresdense and environmental science subjects such as forest zoology or forest botany to food chemistry, the dye collection, zoology and anatomy, electrical engineering and engineering sciences at TUD and HfBK Dresden. As “tangible representations of knowledge” (Olaf Holzapfel), the “object tableaux” impressively show the opulence and diversity of the Saxon university collections between crafts, technology, science, research and fine arts.

Instead of abolishing genre boundaries between science and art, associative connecting lines are created that make material, form, composition, and function newly legible as image- and possibly even world-constituting factors: fine art and natural sciences feed from the same sources. The complementary staging of the exhibition with the tableaux as a form of organisation and display and Holzapfel’s artistic settings opens up new perspectives on contemporary living spaces and their history, on that “in-between” (Olaf Holzapfel) in the relationship between humankind, nature, thing and time.

Opening hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–6pm. Exhibition opening: September 26, 2024, 7pm, Albertinum, Dresden State Art Collections.

Curatorial team:  Kirsten Vincenz / Dr. Jörg Zaun / Gwendolin Kremer (Office for Academic Heritage, Scientific and Art Collections at TUD), Susanne Greinke (HfBK Dresden)

Additional links: Office for Academic Heritage, Scientific and Art Collections (Kustodie). Press contact: Carolin Kost, e-mail: carolin.kost[at]tu-dresden.de.

*Images above: (5) Ravine forest stream perennials of Saxon Switzerland, Formation herbarium of Alexander Naumann, Dresden, 1920. (6) Artistic forging of roses, Künschert & Söhne, Dresden, around 1880. Inv. no. MTS90717. (7) Hand forging of nuts, Dresden, around 1880. Inv. no. MTS90472.