Bastei

Since 1997, the artist Olaf Nicolai, born in 1962 in Halle (Saale), has been developing a diverse body of interdisciplinary work dealing with themes of art, nature, music, the body, space, and time. The work shown here, "Bastion", is an ornamental stone made of white-painted fiberglass. Its form is not amenable to viewing from a single, fixed perspective. Taken as a single item, it is an autonomous object of abstract sculpture - although it can also be understood as a fragment. It served as the basis for the construction of a modernist, ornamented wall built in the '60s behind a shopping complex in the center of Dresden. In its reduction to mere form, Nicolai's work has more precisely formulated the question concerning the ideological content of shapes.