OAK, »HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN [Walther PPK_nitted]«, Mixed Media, 2025
The white crocheted pistol titled Happiness is a Warm Gun is referring to the Beatles‘ song of the same name from 1968 (The White Album). The title of the work quotes a phrase from an American gun magazine, which John Lennon adopted as a bitterly ironic comment on American gun culture. The textile covering contrasts the weapon’s inherent aggressiveness with the apparent harmlessness of the crochet work >>> a visual shift that underscores the ambiguity of the title. Beyond the critique of violence, the metaphor of the “warm gun” also carries a sexual undertone: Lennon himself spoke of a possible allusion to ecstasy and desire. The artwork thus points to the ambivalence of happiness—caught between longing and danger, between comfort and destruction. The pistol <the iconic Walther PPK> is presented in this piece at approximately four times life size (cf. The Beatles). This scale distortion renders it unusable as a real object while simultaneously making it more monstrous. The seemingly innocuous warming crochet covering further subverts this condition and intensifies the tension between threat and protection, intimacy and violence.
OAK, »What The Shit Is Going On? [6.8.1945 // 3.9.2017]«, Mixed Media, 2024
On 6 August 1945, the US forces dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima to end the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of the bomb. Since 1945, over 2000 nuclear tests have been carried out by eight nations worldwide. An explosive force equivalent to around 34,000 Hiroshima bombs has been released in the process and into our atmosphere. On 3 September 2017, a nuclear bomb was detonated (unannounced) for test purposes as part of North Korea‘s nuclear weapons programme. Its explosive power was ten times that of the Hiroshima bomb. For every unannounced nuclear test by North Korea, the military defence services of the superpowers USA and Russia only have a maximum of six minutes to decide whether an attack situation exists and whether a nuclear counter-strike must therefore be carried out.
OAK, »Extinction to Go / The [Nuclear] Football«, 2024/25 , Mixed Media
Laser-Stereolithography, Photopolymer handpainted, 499,77mm x 439,31mm x 292,12mm (Ph. Igor Panitz)
LUDWIG GIES PRIZE FOR SCULPTURE 2025 · Awarded by LETTER Stiftung Cologne
»The potentially most dangerous object on our planet. Officially referred to as the „Presidential Emergency Satchel,“ this atomic briefcase enables the President of the United States to authorize a nuclear strike. It allows for the launch of individual strategic missiles or even a global nuclear attack. In American parlance, this powerful case is euphemistically called „The [Nuclear] Football.“
Since the 1960s, this bulging leather briefcase has always remained close to the president >never more than an arm‘s length away< under the watchful eye of a specially assigned military aide. A briefcase as a symbol of power and global deterrence, balancing politics and responsibility >>> “The Football“ is by no means just a piece of luggage but rather the control unit for a potential worldwide nuclear Armageddon, ultimately dependent on the decision of a single individual.
The work transforms this historical object into a surreal monument of responsibility and delirium. 3D-printed in polished material, it retains the sleek design language of authority and control, yet reveals its true anatomy: beneath the smooth surface lies a morphing “football” whose form echoes a human skull, its veins and cranial lines visible like a map of concealed catastrophe. The object becomes a reliquary of extinction >>> a portable altar for the end of civilization, always ready for transport, always beside the throne.
The sculpture is not an accusation but an unveiling. It materializes the latent violence of political aesthetics, the way power disguises annihilation as efficiency, and apocalypse as protocol. Extinction to Go is both artifact and omen: a product of the digital age and a prophecy from within it.
By turning the “football” into a skull, the work inverts the myth of heroic leadership. It reveals that beneath the polished symbols of governance lies the most fragile and terrifying truth of all >>> that the end of the world has long been held in human hands.
OA Krimmel: »Extinction to Go is a survival kit for the end of reason. A briefcase built for collapse >>> polished, portable, and perfectly absurd >>> it mirrors the human instinct to aestheticize disaster, to package entropy as useful luggage, and to carry annihilation as baggage.
My work traces the afterlife of progress. It observes how civilizations fossilize themselves through objects >>> how the very materials of modernity, from aluminum to code, form the sediment of a future archaeology. Extinction to Go belongs to that layer: a capsule from a culture that believed overkill nuclear power could outpace consequence.
I am drawn to the fault lines where technology becomes myth, and function turns to relic. In my practice, light behaves like residue, color like radiation. The materials are not chosen for beauty but for their half-life >>> their refusal to die quietly.
Extinction to Go condenses my entire practice into one gesture: an act of witness within a planetary twilight. It treats extinction not as an ending but as a medium >>> the atmosphere through which new forms, new myths, and hopefully a final clarity will emerge.«
OAK, »THE ARK (STRANDED)«, Aasee&Aueteich, 2025-2027, Lightweight concrete, Mixed Media
project for dK and SM 2027
»With The Ark (Stranded), OA Krimmel has embedded a striking image of failed utopia into the landscape of Münster’s Aasee. The large-scale sculpture <a monumental paper boat cast in white lightweight concrete> confronts viewers with a quiet paradox: an object of escape that cannot move, a vessel of salvation already abandoned to stillness.
The reference to Noah’s Ark is unmistakable, but Krimmel’s gesture goes well beyond biblical symbolism. In an era shaped by climate breakdown, migration emergencies, and corporate dreams of Mars colonization, this ark becomes a haunting icon of unrealized rescue. It has not run aground >>> it never set sail. Its placement on a calm artificial urban lake evokes both serenity and futility, suggesting a world where even the myths of salvation have lost their coordinates.
Formally, the work draws on the language of origami >>> fragile, minimal, and meditative. But instead of paper, it is made of concrete: mobility becomes mass, play becomes monument, hope becomes memorial. The Ark (Stranded) hovers between childhood memory and collective dread, between the innocence of folded paper boats and the weight of collapsed futures.
Krimmel’s sculpture reads like a monument to both past and impending catastrophes. It is a stranded promise, a sculptural question mark lodged into the public space. What if rescue is no longer possible >>> not due to lack of means, but because the belief in it has itself become immobile?
By fusing ancient myth with concrete materiality and post-utopian melancholy, The Ark (Stranded) offers a profound reflection on the limits of salvation >>> personal, planetary, and imagined.« (Henry Sarkopt)
OAK, »LIEBESMÜH/CAROUSEL (DETAIL)«, 2024/2274, Mixed Media
OAK, »LIEBESMÜH/CAROUSEL«, 2024/2274, Mixed Media
In the sculpture »Liebesmüh/Carousel«, the interplay of illusion and timelessness takes center stage, drawing conceptual force from the cult dystopian sci-fi film Logan’s Run (1976), set in the year 2274, where no one is permitted to live beyond the age of thirty. The work distills the film’s central ritual <so-called renewal> into a stark visual metaphor: the seductive promise of eternal youth cloaking the inevitability of extinction.
Arranged in a carousel-like circle, the iridescent hands appear not merely to worship, but to summon something greater >>> an ambiguous force, radiant and cruel. Each hand holds a sharply faceted red crystal, echoing both the film’s all defining lifeclock and our own obsession with youthmania, synthetic transcendence, and chemically induced enlightenment (>red crystal meth). In this charged symmetry, »Liebesmüh/Carousel« reflects a society fixated on individual continuation, while quietly proposing that true renewal – evolutionary or otherwise >>> can only occur through the extinction of the singular self in service of the species.
OAK, »TEA PARTY« (Blue Swords on white gold), Mixed Media, 2025, 80 x 70 x 45 cm
OAK, »somewHERE«, (ON-Schaltung), Neon-Installation, 2015/2017
OAK, »nowHERE«, vierfach alternierende Schaltung (NO/NOW/HERE/NOWHERE), Neon-Installation, 2015/2023
OAK, »somewHERE«, (ON-Schaltung), Neon-Installation, 2015/2023
OAK, »My Last Cigarette (Definitely Maybe)«, 3D Print, Objektkasten 20x20cm, 2020
OAK, »Become the one you want to be«, 3D Print, Installation, 2022
OAK, »Memento Mori (Final Stage)«, 3D Print, Objektkasten 20 x 20cm, 2019
OAK, »Brain Enlarger«, (studio view), Ureol/MdF, 1996, 36x47x36 cm
Skulpture for Debut-Expo "Inhale – Exhale", State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart