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Born in 1959 in Hilversum (The Netherlands).
Lives and works in Amsterdam.
www.ewinolaf.com
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Dutch photographer and video artist Erwin Olaf has earned international fame. An exceptional photographer, his work is included in the great collections such as the Ludwig Museum, the Groninger Museum, Art + Public and Margulies in the United States. Erwin Olaf has also exhibited his work in many museums around the world, including the Museum of modern art in Moscow, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the MOCCA Toronto and the MEP in Paris.
"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible" (Oscar Wilde). Erwin Olaf can be considered to have one of the great radical and contemporary views, with an obsession with plastic which might suggest a certain aesthetic superficiality. In reality, his patient exploration of appearances and the perfectionism of his mises en scène, far from transforming his subjects into soulless dummies, reveal the gross enigma of reality. "What is deepest in man is his skin" said Paul Valéry; that is where the true theme of Erwin Olaf’s work lies.
A true lover of shapes and women, Erwin Olaf himself admits that, "when I create my own world, I can express exactly what I mean". A language that is primarily a language of ambiguity and equivocation. Combining the mannerism of his advertising work for major global brands (Levi's, Diesel or Nintendo) with a pictorial and cinematic depth so inspired by Vermeer, Hopper, Mondrian or Tati, Erwin Olaf plays the opposite cards so as to better deceive the observer. Where his shots of sublime young women depict such perfection that one might think them models made of virtual wax, Olaf introduces a disruptive element into the microcosm of demiurge. Rain, a blink of an eyelid, silence ... nothing very invisible in itself but which worms its way into the image as if it were an oddity, a silent quasi-monstrosity. Erwin Olaf offers a spectacular view of the ambiguity in his art: between over-objectivity and sentimentality, advertising superficiality and aesthetic theorisation, right and wrong ... and leaving over the years an increasingly greater share to the immediate manifestation of the human, the too human.
The Grief series was inspired by Jacqueline Kennedy and the assassination in Dallas. (...) The subjects of "Grief" are captured on the edge of a cliff: the announcement of the drama, the permanent absence of the expected one, the impossible return home. Erwin Olaf sets each image in these bourgeois neutralizing interiors from the 50s, capturing the decisive moment, the moment before the fall, before giving in to tears, shouts and anger.
And where the characters previously filled the space, there are now everyday objects that scream out their presence in the image: a glass filled with whiskey that will never be emptied, the plate of food that is already cold awaiting a guest who will not come, furniture exuding outdated comfort, the stocking that no longer needs to be put on, this dress, the carefully arranged hairstyle we will never see untidy, this clock we want to stop. Sublimating his female models in a quasi-Flemish light, bestowing upon them names borrowed from contemporary mythology (Caroline, Victoria, Barbara, Irene). Invisible pain, not even sketched, yet that resonates within us, as if we had to collectively mourn a certain western fate embodied in the American aesthetic of the fifties, a decade that was full of the ideology of progress which for some ended in 1963.
Taken from an article by Nicolas Denis, published on his blog Next Exit Please (http://nicolaspetit.wordpress.com)
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