Carolina Nitsch is pleased to present Olaf Nicolai’s second solo exhibition with the gallery entitled Z. Point, which consists of 80 photographs, a floor installation and an artist’s book.

Z. Point originated with the artist’s 2008 visit to Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, California, a site known for unusually striking geological formations as well as the eponymous film by Michelangelo Antonioni. The location was packed with tourists during the day who were primarily interested the geological significance and may never have heard of Antonioni. In order to explore the area alone Nicolai needed to go there at night. Because of the intense darkness, he used the camera flash on his cell phone to guide his path. As an unintentional result, 80 photographs were taken, documenting this exploration. These images now line the gallery walls in the same order they were taken so that the viewer can also traverse the same path as the artist.

Nicolai’s installation presents the viewer with a counter point by exploring this landscape at night as opposed to Antonioni’s bright, sexually powered work. By using the flash at night to capture the landscape, while the sun is on the other side of the planet, Nicolai removes the grandeur of the place and replaces it with a curious sort of longing or searching, as if waiting for life to happen.

While "wandering" around in the gallery space and watching the photographed landscape, visitors are in fact moving through another landscape, which is formed by the second piece in the show. Pooled on the gallery floor are small formations of glass, whose total volume corresponds exactly to the artist’s specific body volume. They work like fragments of the artist’s body left behind as an abstracted self-portrait, like an alternate echo of Zabriskie Point. This glass sculpture was specially developed for the first presentation of Z. Point in the US and is exhibited here for the first time.

Another element, also a new production for this show, is an appropriated double page spread from a monograph, published in Italy in the early seventies, about the making of the Antonioni film. It depicts documentary production photographs in the desert showing mirrors redirecting daylight for the shooting as well as a sketch of camera positions in the valley to film the final scene.

In Z.Point, as in much of Nicolai’s conceptual work, the approach is to ask the viewer to look askew at a subject, a place, a regular pattern or familiar image, and to examine it from a different point of view, as an alternate experience. Through integrating art, nature, literature, scientific findings, the body, time, space, collective memory and the subconscious, Nicolai has developed many interdisciplinary projects and an extensive body of work in all media.

One of Nicolai’s upcoming presentations in October is the project "Esaclier du Chant" at the Louvre, Paris, which includes comissioned songs by 11 contemporary international composers. At the Bauhaus, in Dessau-Rosslau he will redesign the interiors of the two “Master Houses” of Gropius and Moholy-Nagy. Nicolai recently won a competition to design the “Monument for the persecuted of the Military Justice” during National Socialism in Austria, which will be inaugurated next year in the center of Vienna, opposite the presidential office at Ballhausplatz.

Olaf Nicolai was born 1962 in Halle/Saale; he lives and works in Berlin.

Carolina Nitsch Gallery
534 West 22nd Street
New York (NY) 10011 United States
Tel. +1 (212) 6452030
info@carolinanitsch.com
www.carolinanitsch.com

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