About the Exhibition
“I want to trigger something in your head, so that you’re going to make up your own story”—Erwin Olaf
A leading Dutch photographer known for meticulously staged images that challenge social taboos and explore human frailty, Erwin Olaf died last year at the age of 61, leaving a wide-ranging body of work that merges hyperrealism with mysterious fantasy. As described in The New York Times, “Mr. Olaf’s signature technical elements: painterly lighting, formalist composition, styling that we associate with fashion photography — that seductive, perfectionistic polish. Then there’s the final touch that elevates Mr. Olaf’s images into the realm of high art, an unsettling feeling. As viewers, we are always compelled to ask: What has happened here?”
Olaf began his career as a photographer documenting the club and party scene in Amsterdam, as well as the emerging gay rights movement, and he maintained and active presence in the LGBTQ+ community throughout his lifetime. As his practice evolved from commercial and fashion photography into fine art, Olaf was influenced by the aesthetics of American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and by film: “The older I get, the more I start to realize that I’m more influenced by cinema than by photography,” he said. “Although there are big, big beautiful photographs, when you are going to the cinema, you can always make up your own story. You have more emotion. I never cry over a photo, but I cry over a movie, or music or literature. That makes me always a bit jealous. So I want to achieve that a bit in my photography.”
The cinematic quality of film stills is present in this selection of Olaf’s works from 2009 to 2022. The two Portrait 1 images, Dusk and Dawn, are close-ups of men in stylized dress, their coiffed and made-up faces suggesting more aesthetic perfection than living, breathing presences. The young woman and child featured in examples from the artist’s Shanghai series also evoke mystery: why are the child’s eyes bandaged, and what is troubling the young woman in the doorway? The Shanghai (2017) images, along with Berlin (2012), and Palm Springs (2018) form a three-part project that Olaf shot on location, rather than in a fabricated studio environment. In this trilogy, the artist explores major cities across the world that are undergoing seismic change, reflecting upon the psychological states of these cities and their inhabitants. Olaf describes these and other related works as depicting “a perfect world with a crack.”
The global crack of the COVID -19 pandemic inspired Olaf to turn from the staged world of the studio to the outdoors, where he created his Im Wald (In the Forest) works, his first series where landscape and nature are the central focus. While a human presence is discernable in In der Abenddämmerung (At Dusk), it is the relationship of humans to nature that dominates the image. Inspired by the 19th-century Romanticism of painters Arnold Bocklin and Caspar David Friedrich, the Im Wald series “depicts life a walk towards the unknown, and nature as a symbol of our transience.”
One of Olaf’s last and most personal series, Dance In Close-Up (2022) was created in collaboration with grand master of Dutch dance Hans van Manen to commemorate his 90th birthday. Olaf’s photos and videos of van Manen and dancers were directed by van Manen, the poses and movements drawn from thirteen different choreographies. While staged and directed, the images of dancers’ bodies, and of van Manen, evoke the mysterious and poetic qualities of Olaf’s unique vision.
