In his artistic oeuvre, Olaf Nicolai questions the processes of perception in order to elicit a different kind of reception. "Questions of form, moods, attitudes and style are not just vain play with surfaces. They are questions of organisational forms of activities", he writes in his essay "Show Case". In his works, Nicolai displays attitudes and styles, combining and collecting them. He integrates classical artistic techniques and collecting, the securing of evidence and archiving as the activities of an artistic production. In his surprising, often overwhelming installations, Nicolai combines current questions of natural sciences and the liberal arts with conceptual works that refer to biology, architecture, aesthetics, iconography, history and general processes of civilisation and urban life. His focus is on the construction and exploration of new aesthetic contexts, often reflecting the difference between nature and art, naturalness and artificiality. The monograph is published to mark the occasion of Olaf Nicolai receiving the Kunstpreis award of the city of Wolfsburg in 2002.