Wolfgang Oelze

Lassoland Publishing, Hamburg, 2020
96 pages, 24 x 32 cm, 67 plates, thread-stitching, softcover, German/English
ISBN: 978-3-00-064476-4

Including a text by Sven Beckstette

“Wolfgang Oelze’s photographs and videos can be understood as artistic research into architecture and technology, cinematic images, and historical topography that describes the cave as a metaphor for how we approach the world and our abysses. This makes the artist a speleologist, but one who takes far more than the material nature of caves into account—and ultimately manifests our hidden unconscious.” (Sven Beckstette)

Supported by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg

Watch the book presentation video.

Snoeck Verlag, Köln, 2019
224 pages, 18 x 24 cm, 205 plates, thread-stitching, softcover, German/English

Edited by Dirk Luckow and Wolfgang Oelze
ISBN 978-3-86442-287–4

This catalog is published in conjunction with the exhibition Fuzzy Dark Spot at the Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg, from April 13 to November 3, 2019. It includes a preface by Dirk Luckow and an introduction by curator Wolfgang Oelze. The book offers comprehensive essays by Friedrich Wolfram Heubach, Thomas Macho, Claudia Reiche, Gerd Roscher and Siegfried Zielinski as well as explanations on the individual artworks.

The exhibition Fuzzy Dark Spot brings together video works by mostly Hamburg-based artists ranging from the 1970s to the present day, featuring historical and contemporary productions. The exhibition examines how video in art interprets social and media irritations and manipulations. The fields of this investigation include references in video art to television, the educational movement of the counter-public of the 1970s, as well as the use of video as a surveillance medium, a means of artistic narrative, a psychosocial mirror, and an instrument of self-optimization in the digital present. The major impact of video images on the collective memory and consciousness in the 20th and 21st centuries makes doubts about images, the uneasiness with the familiar, as well as the distrust of truth claims important subjects of artistic reflection. The title summarizes the common theme of the works in the exhibition: a nebulous, fuzzy dark spot, place, or condition.

https://www.sammlung-falckenberg.de/en/exhibitions/fuzzy-dark-spot-videokunst-aus-hamburg/

order the catalog

Revolver Publishing, Berlin, 2014
96 pages, 24 x 32 cm, 70 plates, thread-stitching, softcover, German/English
ISBN 978-3-95763-095-7 (order here)

Including texts by Jens Asthoff and Thomas Macho

“Motifs of inclusion and smoke are recurring visual elements in the photo and video work of Wolfgang Oelze. They characterize how he visually addresses voids, labyrinths, bunkers, mounds, quarries and catacombs, or fuzzy spots in various spaces, which first come across like places of memory without disclosing the contents of the memory. In some places, slender plumes of smoke arise without a visible source of fire, spreading like ground mist in the scattered sunlight like local ectoplasms, apparitions in haunted locations that invoke no wars, acts of violence, or sacrificial rituals. [....] They are the effects of the formlessness that correspond to one’s own unconscious – and a respect for the power of this unconscious.” (Thomas Macho)

exhibition views

Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg

12" Vinyl Cut, 8 tracks, 22 minutes duration, 2015

Edition 10 +2 AP, signed and numbered.

Excerpts:

Liner notes by Robert Engelbrecht (in German)