Erwin Olaf. Biografia

Nato in Olanda nel 1959 Erwin Olaf è uno degli artisti più innovativi che attualmente lavorano nel campo della fotografia. Ha tenuto importanti mostre personali allo Stedelijk Museum di Amsterdam, al Groninger Museum in Olanda, al Frankfurter Kunsteverein e al Ludwig Museum in Germania, al Paris Photo, alla Flatland Gallery di Utrecht, alla Wessel O'Connor di New York, all'Espacio Minimo di Madrid e numerose altre. Nel 1988 ha vinto il premio Giovani Fotografi Europei in Germania, nel 1998 il Leone d'argento a Cannes per la campagna pubblicitaria della Diesel e di nuovo nel 2001 per la campagna pubblicitaria della Heineken. Una sua foto è stata scelta come manifesto della Biennale di Valencia 2001. Nel settembre 2003 il Groninger Museum, ha inaugurato una grande retrospettiva sui 25 anni della sua opera. Il Man presenta le serie complete di: Paradise The Club, Paradise Portrait, Mature, Royal Blood, una selezione da Fashion Victims, Blacks e Body Parts per un totale di 48 fotografie oltre ai video Tadzio, Millennium e Clowns, grazie allo Studio Erwin Olaf, alla Galleria Espacio Minimo e alla galleria B&D.

 

(da teknemedia)

Erwin Olaf was born in 1959 in Hilversum, The Netherlands. Olaf has a passionate love affair with life, and enjoys to the full everything it has to offer. His oeuvre is a manifestation of his passion and of his genuine engagement with his subjects. Olaf has been professionally active for twenty-five years and in this period he has succeeded in evolving from a participating photographer to a director who creates his own reality. Olaf's pictures are filled with humor, imagination and exuberance, but they go much further than simple visual intrigue. His works deal with freedom, beauty, loneliness, and being different. He convinces his public in a shameless and versatile manner, questioning established norms. Olaf consistently expresses his own standpoints, fulminating against narrow-mindedness, smugness, and rigid norms, but not without humor, bravura and bite. An authentic Olaf is a blow to the head, ruthlessly direct, but simultaneously wrong footing the viewer and poking fun. One reviewer remarked that in Erwin Olaf's photographs everyone stares unwaveringly into the lens--thus looking straight into the photographer's big blue eyes, as it were. Olaf approaches the world openly and enthusiastically and this is also the way in which, in his work, he dares to enter the public debate. Olaf is a master in generating his own world, whether this be in autonomous photographic series or film projects. He is also hypercritical, nothing escapes him, so that pictures are created with a placement composed so meticulously that it is almost painful to examine. With these, Olaf manages to produce fictitious yet convincing images of bygone days, fairytales and dreams, populated by historical figures, elves, dwarves, lunatics, and god knows who.

 

(da M+B gallery)