The 2024 Zurich Art Prize goes to Olaf Holzapfel

In his multi-layered oeuvre, Olaf Holzapfel deals with the conception and materiality of spaces. After the 2000s, during which he particularly focused on megalopolises and their relationship with virtual space, observing a kinship between urban structures’ grids and the internet’s digital grids, his interest increasingly shifted toward the physically material site. Since then, Holzapfel has been searching for ways to artistically dissolve dualities, such as those of city and landscape, interior and exterior, or virtual and real visual spaces, and to describe them as something fluid. The result is a constant exchange between these forces.

His work revolves around intercultural exchange with artists and artisans, as well as recourse to vernacular techniques. For example, Holzapfel has been working for more than ten years with weavers from the Wichí community in Argentina’s Gran Chaco and with carpenters from Lower Saxony, who implement his designs using natural and locally typical materials, such as wood, straw or natural fibers. The projects produced in this way are process-oriented and collectively developed during an ongoing exchange of knowledge between all participants.

The Zurich Art Prize jury was particularly enthusiastic about Olaf Holzapfel’s adept handling of a wide range of very different media and spaces. His works, realized in a multifaceted formal language, raise substantial questions, for instance about production mechanisms or the relationship between culture and nature, without losing any of their poetic lightness. His groups of works, developed over several years, captivate with a continuity that resists the fast pace of our times in an enchanting way.