Erwin Olaf
Born in Hilversum, the Netherlands, Erwin Olaf (1959 – 2023) is an internationally exhibiting artist whose diverse practice centres on society’s marginalised groups, including women, people of colour and the LGBTQ+ community. In 2019, Olaf was appointed Knight of the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands after 500 works were added to the Rijksmuseum collection. Taco Dibbits, Director of the Rijksmuseum, described him as “one of the most important photographers of the last quarter of the twentieth century.”
In 2018, Olaf completed a triptych of monumental photographic and filmic works portraying periods of seismic change in major cities around the world, and the citizens who are either carried by or left behind in the wake of urban progress. As with much of his work, it is contextualised by complex racial dynamics, the devastation caused by economic divides and the complications of sexuality. Olaf has maintained an activist approach to equality throughout his 40-year career, having begun by documenting pre-AIDS gay liberation within Amsterdam’s nightlife during the 1980s.
A bold and sometimes controversial approach has earned the artist a number of prestigious collaborations, from Vogue and Louis Vuitton to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He served as the official portraitist of the Dutch Royal Family in 2017 and designed the national face of the euro coins for King Willem-Alexander in 2013. He has been awarded the Johannes Vermeer Award of the Netherlands, International Color Awards Photographer of the Year, and Kunstbeeld magazine’s Dutch Artist of the Year.
Olaf has exhibited worldwide, including at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain; Museu da Imagem e do Som, São Paulo, Brazil; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany; the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile. In spring 2019, his work was the subject of a double exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag and The Hague Museum of Photography, as well as a solo exhibition at the Shanghai Centre of Photography and another at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In 2021, he presented solo shows at Kunsthalle München, Germany, and the Suwon Museum of Art, Suwon, South Korea.
Olaf’s work is included in numerous public and private collections, such as the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, USA; the Art Progressive Collection, USA; and the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia.
