Exhibition from 27 September to 1 December 2024 in the Oktogon, Kunsthalle der HfBK Dresden

What treasures do university collections hold? What do they tell us about the history, present and future of knowledge production in art, technology and research? In the exhibition DEPTH AND SURFACE, more than 100 scientific "object tableaux" are shown for the first time in combination with artistic tableaux by the internationally renowned Dresden artist Olaf Holzapfel .

The starting point of the exhibition are the more than 40 university teaching and research collections of the Technische Universität Dresden (TUD) and the Dresden University of Fine Arts (HfBK). These collections contain models, educational panels, moulages, preparations and objects of other genres that have been produced or collected over the last 200 years with special didactic or scientific intentions for teaching and research.

The show focuses on the hitherto little-examined genre of the tableau: display panels or boxes with arrangements of exhibits. In combination with these historical "object tableaus", works created and arranged especially for the project by Olaf Holzapfel (*1967 in Dresden, lives in Berlin) can be seen: Foldings, paintings, works with natural materials such as the hay paintings and models of the past 20 years as well as a new half-timbered work. He has achieved international renown with his half-timbered constructions and hay and straw pictures, which are a decided 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, now and tomorrow.

The complementary exhibition staging with the tableaus as a form of order 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 man, nature, thing and time.

• 27 September to 1 December 2024

• Oktogon. Kunsthalle der Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HfBK) Dresden, Georg-Treu-Platz 1, 01067 Dresden,

• Opening times: Tue - Sun, 11 am - 6 pm