Olaf Holzapfel

Olaf Holzapfel’s paintings, mixed-media sculptures, and photographs are meditations on the subjective experience of light as seen through fragments of urban and rural architecture and embodied in maquettes, diagrams, and grids. Holzapfel is interested in how humans order their natural surroundings and vice versa. For “My personal interweaved habitats” (2010), Holzapfel created sculptures made from locally sourced, traditional materials from around the world—an installation of timber-frame houses made from cactus fiber references traditional architectural materials of a native tribe in Argentina, while creations of braided straw evoke Polish craftmaking customs.