Olaf Metzel’s recent work is dedicated to German movie maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder and his compatriot writers Ernst Jünger and Arno Schmidt, whose positions remained controversial in society until today.
The exhibited works are the contintuation of his aluminium series that Metzel started in 2010. With the help of digital techniques he prints excerpts of handwritten letters, manuscripts and screenplays, private photographies and unpublished documents of the protagonists on aluminium plates. Then he hand-folds, buckles and deformes these plates in a way that they look like monumental versions of randomly scrunched up paper and installs them on the wall.
By using selected documents that reflect the individual life’s of the protagonists, Metzel creates an abstract but at the same time very specific portrait of each one of them.
The protagonists he chose crossed boarders and broke new grounds. Often they have been both critisized and questioned for their work as well as awarded with highly respected grants and prizes. After the series of 2010 Olaf Metzel once more uses the sculptural portrait to set his focus on personalites who did not choose the „common way of living“ but challenged life by excessive productivity, stern disciplin and extreme lifestyles. Being different is the key aspect that unites Rainer Werner Fassbinder (2012), Ernst Jünger (2014) and Arno Schmidt (2014) with the characters depicted in earlier works by Olaf Metzel such as Jimi Hendrix (2010) or Amy Winehouse (2010).
By using selected documents that reflect the individual life’s of the protagonists, Metzel creates an abstract but at the same time very specific portrait of each one of them.
The protagonists he chose crossed boarders and broke new grounds. Often they have been both critisized and questioned for their work as well as awarded with highly respected grants and prizes. After the series of 2010 Olaf Metzel once more uses the sculptural portrait to set his focus on personalites who did not choose the „common way of living“ but challenged life by excessive productivity, stern disciplin and extreme lifestyles. Being different is the key aspect that unites Rainer Werner Fassbinder (2012), Ernst Jünger (2014) and Arno Schmidt (2014) with the characters depicted in earlier works by Olaf Metzel such as Jimi Hendrix (2010) or Amy Winehouse (2010).
About the artist
Galerie Klüser has been representing the Berlin-born (1952) sculptor and object artist Olaf Metzel since 1998. Based in Munich, he teaches as a professor of sculpture at the local Academy of Fine Arts. As an artist he became famous for space-oriented installations. Erected in public spaces and alluding to political and social circumstances, his works caused a lot sensation. Metzel uses objects that are symbolically charged within their specific context such as scrap, crowd barriers and stadium seats. Apart from monumental sculpture the artist also creates wall pieces that contain of imprinted and deformed aluminium plates. The subjects derive from current affairs or topics that the artist is personally engaged with. For a separate series Metzel uses scripts and manuscripts by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Arno Schmidts as well as Ernst Jünger’s letters and photographs. In 1987 the artist participated in documenta VIII in Kassel, Germany. During the fourth Berlin Biennale in 2002 he also curated the exhibition “YBA – Young Bavarian Art”.