Room - Klaus Lehmann and Olaf Holzapfel
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Klaus Lehmann was born in 1927 in Berlin and died in 2016 in Erbach. As he turned seventy – just around the time when one millenium was tipping over into another – he discovered a new freedom as an artist. It led him to a form of ceramics where the objects stand alone, withdrawing from any kind of decorative function and confronting the viewer with a profound austerity whose attraction lies in the enigma of its concentrated intensity. Lehmann is still little known except by connoisseurs, and this exhibition, for the first time, provides a retrospective of his later work in his native city, Berlin. His estate is administered by the Galerie Angelika Metzger.
Olaf Holzapfel was born in Görlitz in 1969 and now lives and works in Berlin. He exhibited at this year's Documenta in Athens and Kassel with two installations. His six-metre long painting, "Lauf" (an ambiguous, complex word in German which here can perhaps best be translated as “progression” or “subsequence”) stands out with its highly complex abstract construction. It features monochrome surfaces, sequences of curves, seemingly three-dimensional cuboid shapes, fine lines, vertical and horizontal compositions of diagonal lines, connectivity and fracturing.