Erwin Olaf: Strange Beauty

by Erwin Olaf (Photographer), Roger Diederen (Editor), Anja Huber (Editor)

This new volume features the artist’s latest works as well as an interview and insightful essays, providing the most comprehensive look at Erwin Olaf’s work to date.

In his work, the Dutch artist Erwin Olaf (1959) creates worlds which are thought through to the smallest detail. They look confusingly similar to our own, but often pose a riddle: behind the immaculate aesthetics borrowed from the film and advertising industry, something repressed is lurking.

His works are negotiating questions about democracy, equality or self-determination. On the occasion of his first major solo exhibition in Germany, this accompanying catalogue explains key aspects of Olaf’s artistic work.

At the same time, it offers an attractive overview of his multifaceted work over the past forty years. Olaf’s most recent works, which were created especially for the exhibition in the Kunsthalle Munich, are also published here.

Erwin Olaf began to capture nightlife with documentary photography in the 1980s and developed into an artist who, as a director and photographer, creates cinematic photographs that are mostly characterized by a mystical atmosphere. His work is recognized worldwide and presented in many exhibitions.

Genres: Photography

240 pages, Hardcover

Published March 1, 2021

About the author

Erwin Olaf was an internationally exhibiting artist whose diverse practice centered around society’s marginalized individuals, including women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community. In 2019 Olaf became a Knight of the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands after 500 works from his oeuvre were added to the collection of the Rijksmuseum. Taco Dibbits, Rijksmuseum director, called Olaf “one of the most important photographers of the final quarter of the 20th century”.

In 2018, Olaf completed a triptych of monumental photographic and filmic tableaux portraying periods of seismic change in major world cities, and the citizens embraced and othered by their urban progress. Like much of his work, it is contextualized by complex race relations, the devastation of economic divisions, and the complications of sexuality. Olaf has maintained an activistic approach to equality throughout his 40-year career after starting out documenting pre-AIDS gay liberation in Amsterdam’s nightlife in the 1980s.

A bold and sometimes controversial approach has earned the artist a number of prestigious collaborations, from Vogue and Louis Vuitton, to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. He served as the official portrait artist for the Dutch royal family in 2017, and designed the national side of the euro coins for King Willem-Alexander in 2013. He has been awarded the Netherlands’ prestigious Johannes Vermeer Award, as well as Photographer of the Year at the International Color Awards, and Kunstbeeld magazine’s Dutch Artist of the Year.

Erwin Olaf has exhibited worldwide, including Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Málaga, Spain; Museu da Imagem e do Som, São Paulo, Brazil; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile. In the spring of 2019, Olaf’s work was the subject of a double exhibition at Kunstmuseum The Hague and The Hague Museum of Photography, as well as a solo exhibition at the Shanghai Center of Photography and an exhibition at The Rijkmuseum of Amsterdam. In 2021, he will mount solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle München, Germany; the Suwon Museum of Art, Suwon, Korea. Olaf’s work is included in numerous private and public collections, such as the Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk Museum, both in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, The Netherlands, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, United States; Art Progressive Collection, United States, and the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia.