Olaf Nicolai

Olaf Nicolai has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 2011. He works conceptually, with text, graphics, sculpture and installations, and often on a site-specific basis. His work focuses on the relationships between people, art, consumption and nature, also against the background of political and cultural issues. Employing a wide variety of materials, Nicolai creates artificial landscapes, enlarges consumer goods to gigantic proportions and works with advertising graphics torn from their original contexts. Repetition is an important working principle. Familiar motifs are shown in a different light. But Nicolai is also concerned with repeating images from memory.

He poses questions, to himself and the viewer, as here in this series Rainbows: Can a rainbow only become something magical through our perception, or is memory enough? How does perception change with the viewer's point of view? Does the rainbow still exist even when we close our eyes?

His works are represented in many important institutional collections, such as Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg; Brandenburgische Kunstsammlungen Cottbus; CAAC, Seville; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; and MoMA, New York.

Olaf Nicolai (born 1962 in Halle/Saale) lives and works in Berlin.

About the technique

Screen printing is a process in which the printing ink is pushed through a fine-mesh fabric onto the medium to be printed using a rubber squeegee. At those points of the motif that are to remain free of ink, the mesh openings of the fabric are made impermeable by means of a stencil.