• TRAVELING THROUGH THE FOREST ON APRIL FOOLS

    In the light of the silence that fell on April 2020’s streets around the globe as the world was sinking into a global crisis as unforeseen by its form as its magnitude, Erwin Olaf has captured the shock it represented for all of us. In this very particular context of a full year of pandemic - one year already… - the artist made two series screaming with truth as well as with intense visual poetry. Acclaimed in 2019 through major museum retrospectives celebrating his 40-years career, Erwin Olaf offers with April Fool (2020) and Im Wald (2021) a poignant testimony that shows his talent but also his ability to renew himself and always amaze us by the accuracy of his images.

    - Magda Danysz

  • APRIL 2021 - 'IM WALD' (IN THE FOREST)

  • The inspiration behind the series On a trip to Munich in the summer of 2020, the artist was offered to...

    Im Wald, Am Wasserfall, 2020

    The inspiration behind the series

    On a trip to Munich in the summer of 2020, the artist was offered to go trekking in a nearby forest. Between a cacophonous world struck by the pandemic and this silent, exquisite, seemingly untouched natural setting, the contrast was striking. Olaf came up with the idea of a series where the balance of power would shift, where Nature would be the dominant force. A few months later, the series Im Wald – “In the Forest” – was born.

  • "In this new Im Wald series, I wanted to create a mystery around traveling. My whole life I really had a difficult relationship with reality. That’s why I moved into the studio. I could stage my own fantasy, my own dream world, my own surrealism."

    - Erwin Olaf

  • ARTWORKS FROM 'IM WALD' (2021)

  • A SERIES AT THE CENTER OF OLAF'S ART

    Im Wald, Der Schwan, 2020

    A SERIES AT THE CENTER OF OLAF'S ART

    There is continuity between Erwin Olaf’s different projects. Im Wald, with its emphasis on Nature, recalls the series Palm Springs shot in 2018, and takes the counterpoint of Shanghai, another series shot in 2018, which was about the city and what is quintessentially urban.

     

    The choice of black and white here is a way to depict a harsh and threatening nature, but also the artist’s desire to go back to his debuts in photography. In this sense it is reminiscent of such works as Chessmen or Ladies Hats, some of his most renown earlier works.

  • "One of my big loves is the human skin, the human body in all its forms. I'm always fascinated by the shadow and the light, how that works on the beauty of every skin."

    Im Wald, Porträt IV, 2020
  • PORTRAITS

  • ROOTED IN ART HISTORY

    Im Wald, Vor der Felswand, Selbstporträt, 2020

    ROOTED IN ART HISTORY

    Olaf likes to dialogue with art history. In 2019, the exhibition 12 x Erwin Olaf at the Rijksmuseum placed his photographs in conversation with Dutch paintings by Rembrandt, Jan Steen, Breitner, who have been a great source of inspiration for the artist throughout his career.

     

    With Im Wald we see many references to 19th-century German romantic painting. One of them points to Caspar Friedrich’s Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, this famous painting where a young man is seen from the back, standing on top of a rock overlooking a blanket of mist. This time, the man is older: Erwin Olaf took the place of the young wanderer. This time, it is Nature that towers over everything.

  • Erwin Olaf’s photos have the gloss of fashion shots and a haunting undercurrent that makes you long for more context.
    - Nina Siegal, The New York Times.

  • “One day at the hotel, I saw this mother and her child and they were dressed in traditional niqabs, and...
    Im Wald, Auf dem See, 2020

     “One day at the hotel, I saw this mother and her child and they were dressed in traditional niqabs, and this gave me the idea to refer to Die Toteninsel (The Isle of the Dead), one of the most famous paintings of the 19th century.

  • THE PROCESS

    Im Wald, Porträt III, 2020

    THE PROCESS

    Erwin Olaf prints his photographs himself in his studio. It is essential for him to have full control over the final product, and to pay as much as attention to the printing as to the shooting.  “The craftsmanship of photography is really still very much part of my being,” he says. “I love to combine the content with craftsmanship. The making of the print is the emotion of the photography — the paper you choose, and the preciseness of the light is very important, the focus and the depth of the shadow.

  • [Making Of] Im Wald - Erwin Olaf

    A short film about the shooting of the intriguing series Im Wald . Follow Erwin Olaf to Bavaria, Germany, and see how the Dutch photographer and his team get down...
  • APRIL 2020 - APRIL FOOL

  • Contrary to Olaf’s habit of making multiple references to the past, the series Im Wald is set in our present world, and so is April Fool, another series shot in early 2020. With so much happening globally, the artist felt the urgency to talk about the world we live in today. But these series are also very personal. Erwin Olaf put a lot of himself in them, taking images not only of himself but also of his husband, laying bare deep personal feelings related to ageing and the age gap in his marriage, or the anxieties one may have about the current state of the world.

  • The idea for April Fool came to Olaf as he was grocery shopping and found that five items out of...
    April Fool, 09.45 am, 2020

    The idea for April Fool came to Olaf as he was grocery shopping and found that five items out of ten on his list were out of stock. This really baffled him. Like most of us he had always assumed that everything would always be here, that “our dancing on the volcano’s edge would never end,” he says. From then he knew that he wanted to stage this extraordinary situation, and so he turned himself into a clown with a mournful look, whose painted face is the embodiment of fear.

     

  • “The visual narrative of April Fool 2020 gives shape to the emotions and images that paralyzed me after we all...

    April Fool, 11.05 am, 2020

    “The visual narrative of April Fool 2020 gives shape to the emotions and images that paralyzed me after we all suddenly woke up in the surreal nightmare of this pandemic.”

    (…)

     

    “It’s dealing with my own personal fear but also with the insecurity of humankind’s future.”

    • Erwin Olaf, April Fool 10.05 am, 2020
      Erwin Olaf, April Fool 10.05 am, 2020
    • Erwin Olaf April Fool 11.00 am, 2020 Fuji chrystal archive digital paper 60 x 80 cm 23 5/8 x 31 1/2 in Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs
      Erwin Olaf
      April Fool 11.00 am, 2020
      Fuji chrystal archive digital paper
      60 x 80 cm
      23 5/8 x 31 1/2 in
      Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs
    • Erwin Olaf April Fool 11.05 am, 2020 Fuji chrystal archive digital paper 60 x 60 cm 23 5/8 x 23 5/8 in Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs
      Erwin Olaf
      April Fool 11.05 am, 2020
      Fuji chrystal archive digital paper
      60 x 60 cm
      23 5/8 x 23 5/8 in
      Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs
    • Erwin Olaf April Fool 10.15 am, 2020 Fuji chrystal archive digital paper 60 x 90 cm 23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs
      Erwin Olaf
      April Fool 10.15 am, 2020
      Fuji chrystal archive digital paper
      60 x 90 cm
      23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in
      Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs
    • Erwin Olaf April Fool 09.30 am, 2020 Fuji chrystal archive digital paper 60 x 90 cm 23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs
      Erwin Olaf
      April Fool 09.30 am, 2020
      Fuji chrystal archive digital paper
      60 x 90 cm
      23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in
      Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs
    • Erwin Olaf April Fool 09.50 am, 2020 Fuji chrystal archive digital paper 60 x 90 cm 23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs
      Erwin Olaf
      April Fool 09.50 am, 2020
      Fuji chrystal archive digital paper
      60 x 90 cm
      23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in
      Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs
    • Erwin Olaf April Fool 11.15 am, 2020 Fuji chrystal archive digital paper 60 x 80 cm 23 5/8 x 31 1/2 in Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs
      Erwin Olaf
      April Fool 11.15 am, 2020
      Fuji chrystal archive digital paper
      60 x 80 cm
      23 5/8 x 31 1/2 in
      Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs
    • Erwin Olaf April Fool 09.45 am, 2020 Fuji chrystal archive digital paper 60 x 90 cm 23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs
      Erwin Olaf
      April Fool 09.45 am, 2020
      Fuji chrystal archive digital paper
      60 x 90 cm
      23 5/8 x 35 3/8 in
      Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs
  • Erwin Olaf was born in 1959 in the Netherlands. After numerous museum exhibitions around the world, Olaf celebrated his 40-year...

    Erwin Olaf was born in 1959 in the Netherlands. After numerous museum exhibitions around the world, Olaf celebrated his 40-year career in 2019 with several major retrospectives of his work: at the Gemeentemuseum and Fotomuseum in The Hague, at the Shanghai Center of Photography, and at the Rijksmuseum, which is now in possession of 500 pieces from the artist's studio collection - photographic prints, videos, portfolios, books - covering his entire career. An exhibition at the Kunsthalle Museum in Munich will take place this year, his first personal exhibition in a German museum. He lives in Amsterdam.

  • Back in time

    Chessmen, XXIV, 1988

    Back in time

    In older works, such as one from Chessmen, a series of naked figures surrealistically dressed in S&M chess pieces, which earned Erwin Olaf the Young European Photographer Award in 1988, and brought him worldwide attention, one can see almost 25 years later Olaf's photographic roots. For the artist who was influenced by the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Helmut Newton, this was a liberating starting point in the exploration of his own vocabulary.

     

    In series as Paradise, shot on 2001, as well as Shanghai, shot in the eponym city in 2018, one can see Erwin Olaf's taste for portraiture and his eye for expressions and emotions.

  • My starting point has always been my imagination, because that allows me to create exactly the image I want. The background, the style, the casting, the post-production on a computer: everything is working to achieve the image I have in mind.

     

     

  • “The challenge is always to imbue the artificial with some degree of honesty, to give it credibility in order to...

    Paradise Portrait Gwenn, 2001

    The challenge is always to imbue the artificial with some degree of honesty, to give it credibility in order to communicate precisely a certain emotion.

  • “He is one of the protagonists of this painterly style of photography, and also the narrative style. His are single-image...

    Hope, Portrait 1, 2005

     “He is one of the protagonists of this painterly style of photography, and also the narrative style. His are single-image narratives. I always call it one-still cinema. You don’t know what happened before and you don’t know how the story will go on, so it’s one-image cinema, and that makes it very enigmatic and irritating, in a nice way.”


    - Wim van Sinderen, curator of the Erwin Olaf exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum of The Hague.

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