Erwin Olaf<\/a>, a Dutch photographer whose softly lit images of people in surrealist situations were seen widely, in venues ranging from the pages of fashion magazines to the galleries of art museums, has died at 64. Olaf\u2019s death was\u00a0announced on Wednesday<\/a>\u00a0by his official Instagram page. His studio\u2019s statement said that he had received a lung transplant a few weeks ago, then became ill earlier today. He was unresponsive to CPR. According to a 2019\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0profile<\/a>, Olaf had been diagnosed with emphysema in 1996 and had been told not to expect to live past 60. He ended up doing so\u2014and expressed optimism at the time that he might even live to be 70.<\/p>\n Like many photographers today, Olaf worked both commercially and not, producing imagery for brands like Bottega Veneta and Diesel while also showing his work in renowned galleries and museums. Part of the reason he was able to do so was that his art did not fully conform either to the expectations of commercial photography or to the accepted look of art photography.<\/p>\n The Netherlands\u2019s King Willem-Alexander and Queen M\u00e1xima issued a statement mourning Olaf as \u201ca peculiar, exceptionally talented photographer and a great artist.\u201d<\/p>\n With its glossy, muted lighting and its mysterious subject, his art combined the aesthetics of the two. His tableaux are often static, stagey, and deliberately open-ended. One image shows three women in a theater that appears to be from a past era; none of them seem to acknowledge each other. Another features a shirtless man kneeling before a pool, with little explanation for his setting or his outfit.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are drawn to his forms\u2019 compositional acumen\u2014the aesthetic substance of his art\u2014for that is what carries emotions,\u201d Donald Kuspit wrote in\u00a0an\u00a0Artforum<\/em>\u00a0review<\/a>\u00a0of one of his shows. \u201cThe figures otherwise seem emotionless, outwardly present but inwardly absent. Without their formal subtlety, Olaf\u2019s photographs would be cold-bloodedly clinical\u2014their subjects as lively as waxworks in Madame Tussaud\u2019s museum.\u201d<\/p>\n Within the Netherlands, Olaf\u2019s work is well-known and widely exhibited. The Gemeentemuseum and the Fotomuseum, both in The Hague, gave Olaf surveys in 2019, and the year before, Olaf donated hundreds of works from his archive to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Yet his art held international appeal, too, and was in 2008 given an Aperture monograph.<\/p>\n \u201cErwin Olaf saw beauty in every person,\u201d Taco Dibbits, director of the Rijksmuseum, said in a statement on Wednesday. \u201cHe was a key figure in history for his activism and role in the LGBTQIA+ community, and a photographer who defined his medium in the Netherlands. An artist of tremendous drive, his attention to detail was unparalleled.\u201d<\/p>\n Erwin Olaf was born in 1959 in Hilversum, the Netherlands. He enrolled in the Utrecht School for Journalism, but eventually chose a significantly different direction.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the teachers of photography saw me lost and unhappy in this environment of mostly writing students, and he convinced me to come to one of his classes,\u201d he\u00a0told\u00a0i-D<\/em><\/a>. \u201cThe first photographs I made were based on a question we as students had to answer to our photography teacher: \u2018What is normal?\u2019 My answer was a series of images I took at a home for mentally disabled people.\u201d<\/p>\n Once he graduated, during the \u201980s, Olaf photographed Amsterdam\u2019s party scene and documented the burgeoning gay liberation movement taking place. Yet he quickly began to eschew a traditional documentary photography practice and embraced staged photography, asking punks and members of the queer community to pose for him in his studio. Within the studio, \u201cI could stage my own fantasy, my own dream world, my own surrealism,\u201d he told the\u00a0Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n His early documentary photographs appeared in Dutch queer publications and were occasionally shot on commission for LGBTQ groups such as COC. Once these images began to circulate more widely, mainstream outlets took note, putting Olaf on the path to fame.<\/p>\n Across the years, he shot many images of himself, subverting centuries-old formulae for self-portraiture in the process. Many are explicitly queer: one 1985 shot is an expressively lit black-and-white image of Olaf\u2019s face covered in semen, while another group of pictures from 2007 shows the artist wearing wigs and makeup. Others, such as a 2000 photograph of the artist wearing a Yves Saint Laurent bag over his face and holding a whip, are less easily parsed.<\/p>\n His self-portraits sometimes meditated on his own mortality.\u00a0Self-Portrait 50 Years: I Wish, I Am, I Will Be<\/em>\u00a0(2009) is a triptych showing one image of the artist as a hard-bodied youth, one image of him as he presently stood, and one image of him with grey hair and a breathing tube in his nose.<\/p>\n He told the\u00a0Times<\/em>, \u201cIt\u2019s a huge advantage that you are aware that you have to live now and not tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n Author:\u00a0Alex Greenberger, ArtNEWS<\/a>\u00a0September 20, 2023<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Hannibal Books<\/a>\u00a0DANCE IN CLOSE-UP: Hans van Manen seen by Erwin Olaf<\/a><\/p>\n Hannibal Books<\/a>\u00a0FLASH | BACK: Mauritshuis Den Haag<\/a>\u00a0(works containing 16 contemporary photographs, including Erwin Olaf)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Erwin Olaf, Photographer Whose Unsettling Imagery Found a Wide Audience, Dies at\u00a064 Erwin Olaf, a Dutch photographer whose softly lit images of people in surrealist situations were seen widely, in venues ranging from the pages of fashion magazines to the galleries of art museums, has died at 64. Olaf\u2019s death was\u00a0announced on Wednesday\u00a0by his official […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5386],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-company-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n