Erwin Olaf

Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf emerged onto the Amsterdam photography scene in his early 20s. His first formal self-portrait shows influence from New York artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe, while also signaling the signatures of his aesthetic throughout his career: layering props and details in open-ended narrative relationships, leading viewers to fantasize about what story is being told. Throughout the 1980s, Olaf became a well-known and well-loved artist and gay rights activist in the Netherlands, photographing drag queens, bodybuilders, fetishists and celebrities at discotheques and other performances. Olaf’s artwork illuminated and celebrated underground scenes, claiming a spotlight for LGBTQ+ identities that expanded everyday possibilities for gay people throughout the Netherlands.
This volume includes a selection of key series centered on the concept of performance, a recurring theme in the artist’s four-decade career. In particular, it delves into Olaf’s intimate and formal relationship with dance. The artist discussed ballet as a major source of inspiration for his personal work, in particular the precision and tension between beauty and gritty strength the genre requires. Olaf’s final completed series, Dance in Close Up (2022), represents a collaboration between the artist and choreographer Hans van Manen, celebrating their shared vision of evocative gesture and the gifts of the stage.
Erwin Olaf was born in the Netherlands in 1959, and died there in 2023. His work is held in permanent collections such as the Rijksmuseum; the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and also circulates on the Dutch Euro coin.

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The work of Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf (born 1959) is recognizable for its high-gloss aesthetic value and compositional precision, all staged down to the smallest detail. His large-scale portraiture and genre scenes are by turns sensual and surreal; each photograph appears as though it could be a frame lifted from a film.
Over the course of his creative career, Olaf has worked as a photojournalist and a fashion photographer as well as a fine art photographer: the confluence of these disciplines informs his signature style of imagery that hints at a darker narrative behind an immaculate varnish. Midcentury advertisements and his own past as a participant in the 1980s club scene also serve to inform the aesthetic that Olaf has painstakingly cultivated over the past four decades. His scenes frequently feature beautiful sitters cast in painterly light; the jewel tones and rich variants of mahogany and chestnut are evocative of a different era without feeling dated.
This volume is published alongside Olaf’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in Germany, providing readers with an in-depth understanding of his multifaceted career through quality reproductions.

Amsterdam-based Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf (born 1959) has long been considered one of today’s foremost practitioners of portrait photography, and the enigmatic and elusively contemplative atmospheres of his theatrical compositions are widely imitated. Saturated in somber yet luminous hues, and exactingly composed, Olaf’s color photographs, usually featuring only one or two people and set indoors, suggest dramatic narratives fraught with intangible restlessness. The attention to emotional character is scrupulous—as Olaf recently told Lyle Rxer in an interview, “you examine the state of the face, the person’s eyes, the small gestures, the way the muscles move slightly, and of course the influence of light and cropping to add to the intuitions you receive. These restrictions are the main reason why I feel more comfortable in my personal projects, where I can fantasize, or let’s say, I can create a world of my imagination.”

This concise catalog offers a journey through Olaf’s entire career to date, from the Chessmen series of the late 1980s that brought him international renown, and for which he was awarded the Young European Photographer Award in 1988, up to the recent Palm Springs project (2018). The volume includes a critical text by Walter Guadagnini and a conversation with the artist.