Olaf MetzelKaffee, Zeitung, Zigaretten

This book accompanying the Kunstverein Heilbronn’s special exhibition with Olaf Metzel at the Kunsthalle Vogelmann brings together for the first time, in a wide-ranging and opulently illustrated selection, the new group of works known as the “newspaper works.” In them monumental scale combines quite naturally with extreme fragility, and, as though a reader had crumpled up the morning paper in annoyance and thrown it away, Olaf Metzel folds, creases and crumples enormous aluminium sheets which, despite their oversized format, look deceptively like their colourful models. Olaf Metzel’s newspaper pages, however, endure; the white, soft paper seems frozen in the unwieldy, cutting sheets of aluminium. The results of this aesthetic of devastation are attractive reliefs that have their classical precedents in art history. Little wonder that viewers stand spellbound before the work on the life and death of Amy Winehouse, for it renders directly and simply visible the hopelessness and rage that were imprinted upon her life. With intellectual brilliance and empathy, Olaf Metzel has arrived at an irresistible combination of content and making. And he has always been ready to put his finger on the wound! Not long ago a female nude cast in bronze – the subject of art history par excellence for centuries – drew howls of rage and death threats upon him by way of one telling detail: the naked woman wears a headscarf. Olaf Metzel’s comment on this, however, is short and to the point: successful aesthetic production = provocation – art can claim no more than that today!

Exhibition:
Kunstverein Heilbronn, Kunsthalle Vogelmann, 16/3 – 23/6/2013