[Backstage] Meet Erwin Olaf in Amsterdan

Since the early eighties, Erwin Olaf has been enjoying puzzling the viewer. “I like being ambiguous,” he says. “This makes for deeper and more interesting stories.”
Erwin Olaf is a Dutch photographer celebrated internationally, whose work is particularly recognizable by the attention that the artist brings to his mise-en-scène. Everything in his photographs stems from meticulous control. Olaf is one of the most sought-after photographers in the world; this wealth of experience grants him a technicality and a mastery of the photographic language that are highly accomplished.
Every detail in his photographs, every prop, every object in the background seems to have been placed there to carry meaning. One could ponder without end over these complex images that recall the paintings of Edward Hopper, or the films of David Lynch: multifaceted stories, narratives whose meaning is scattered all over, giving rise to inexhaustible interpretation.
For Olaf is also a storyteller. His photographs have a beginning, a possible denouement, and the eye of the viewer is drawn to a moment of uncertainty, to an intermediary space where the action is suspended, as if the point of it all was not, in fact, to get to any conclusion, but to be confronted with a hesitation, a secret that deepens as one seeks to unravel it.
Often Olaf likes to revisit the decors and aesthetic conventions of the past, from the 60s or the 50s, all the way back to the Baroque period. Yet with him, these old atmospheres appear modern and uncannily close to us. It's because Olaf is not inclined toward nostalgia. He is interested in the design, the hairstyles, the fashion of previous eras, but his vision is resolutely contemporary.
Full of fantasy, too. His work shows quirkiness that sometimes comes across as exuberant, sometimes discreet, contained in a severe decorum and an atmosphere of seriousness. "Irony is my weapon of choice," he says.
Erwin Olaf has become a master in the art of the evocative silence, the undertone, the barely pronounced allusion. Through a forty-year career, he has produced a considerable body of work, in a remarkably eloquent language of the unspoken.
Erwin Olaf was born in 1959 in the Netherlands. He emerged on the international art scene in 1988 with his series 'Chessmen', which earned him the Young European Photographer Award. After numerous museum exhibitions around the world, Olaf celebrated its 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. He lives in Amsterdam.
For more information about the artist and available works, please Click here