Olaf Nicolai

Olaf Nicolai, born in Halle/Saale in 1962, is one of Germany's leading artists. He works conceptually and breaks new ground in detaching art from the classical forms of representation and marketing. He links art with reflections on markets and materialism, with memories and archival material, and with settings from everyday life. He creates artificial landscapes and urban sceneries, enlarges consumer goods into the gigantic and works with alienated advertising graphics. Repetition is a constant motif in his work; his interest is in the repetitive nature of images from our memory and subconscious. Nicolai often incorporates scientific findings into his concepts. His fascination with mathematical models, universal algorithms, symbolism, and regular patterns is evident in many of his installations.