The Rough Law of Gardens documents Olaf Holzapfel and Nahum Tevet's eponymous joint exhibition and explores the intergenerational differences between two unique artists. Both artists' work rejects the global logic of growth and traverses the bounds of sculpture and painting: each of their practices involves ideas to do with materiality, learning, and memory.
Rather than a conventional two-person show, “The Rough Law of Gardens,” was a thought process in which aspects of work by one artist were developed, exaggerated, but also inversed, or simply ignored in the work of the other. The exhibition did not pretend to render the affinity between the combined selections of works necessary. Instead, it raised questions regarding the relationship, or lack thereof, between the two art practices in order to reflect on the artists' connection with or isolation from the historical circumstances and social realities in which they come.
Published following the eponymous exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Bochum, Germany, and at the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel, from August 23 to October 25, 2015.
Olaf Holzapfel's work (born 1969 in Görlitz, lives and works in Berlin) proves the indissoluble connection between human settlement, technique, and abstraction. Elementary space-generating methods like plaiting, weaving, and latticing—age-old settler techniques—stem from natural linear entities. These techniques are exceptional in that they don't differentiate between technique or machine, or whether a structure is purely functional, for living, or auxiliary. Holzapfel scrutinizes the perception and presence of material within space and whether an image discourse can exist without these physical modules. For him the landscape, and the material it contains, is more than a symbol that fixes identity; rather, it becomes a transmitter.
