• Level Five is a cooperative studio for and by artists. We collectively organise and take care of our spaces and the people making use of them. In this way we create a durable foundation for each of our artistic practices and initiatives.

Level Five is a cooperative studio for and by artists. We collectively organise and take care of our spaces and the people making use of them. In this way we create a durable foundation for each of our artistic practices and initiatives.

Olaf Winkler

untitled, 2021, oil colour, oil crayon, pencil on newspaper, 28 x 24 cm. Photo courtesy Gallery Benhadj & Djilali
The Ghosts of Dr Snow, 2023, oil colour, acryl colour, lacquer, pencil and wax crayon on mixed papers / collage, 178 x 120 cm
UO 8 irl (useful objects), 2021, plaster, xps, on mirror, ca 12 x 20 x 30 cm. Photo courtesy Gallery Benhadj & Djilali

Olaf Winkler studied architecture in Aachen (D) and Vienna (AT). He works as freelance author, architecture journalist, architecture guide and free artist.

With a background in architecture, early artistic works were conceptual as well as architectural in topics and means, often exploring spatial or more abstract relations of coexistence through models, texts and sketches. At a certain point, painting was added as a means within the framework of a specific topic, e.g. the relationship between “I” and the aesthetic construct of “landscape”, and to what extent the former constitutes part of the latter, which includes categorical questions.

Next to works in text and other media, a main part of recent works are either collage paintings in medium to large formats or smaller works which balance between painting and drawing.

The collage paintings mostly evolve from carefully selected magazine pages that have been glued to each other (or torn apart) and that were painted over or overdrawn during and / or after assembly. A conditionally modular system emerges as a painting surface on which existing photographs, to a certain extent images trouvés, text fragments and painterly settings are superimposed. The resulting images are neither abstract nor figurative.

Lately, smaller works have condensed certain systematics of these bigger collages and, working on plain newspaper sheets or leaving out the collage aspect entirely, transferred them onto more intimate formats. Parallel to these a series of architectural-sculptural objects continues to grow parts of which were presented for the first time at the exhibition „Useful Objects“ (2021) by Galerie Benhadj+Djilali at Villa Heike, Berlin.

Notions of drawing, the line, memory, realism and the re-integration of architectural as well as physical aspects into his works are some of the topics discussed in the interview by Bas van den Hout and Eitan Efrat as part of the Radio Level Five interview series: https://soundcloud.com/level-five-317834269/radio-level-five-in-conversation-with-olaf-winkler

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