Paci contemporary gallery presents the anthological exhibition focused on the Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf.
One of the most appreciated photographer in the contemporary art scene, the Dutch Erwin Olaf is considered one of the best interpreters of modern portrait photography: he’s know all over the world for a photographic style dominated by mysterious and contemplative atmospheres. Famous for his mise en scènes and his theatrical compositions, Olaf intertwines in his shots complex and dramatic narratives. His works strike for the strangeness, the will to provoke, for the sense of loneliness and restlessness: they are glimmers of truth, cracks in the wall that reveal the imperfection and the fiction of a seemingly perfect world.
The exhibition offers a journey within the whole production of the artist, a comprehensive overview of his work, beginning with his “Chessmen”, the series that made him famous at international level allowing him the victory at the competition “Young European Photographer” in 1988, until his last project “Palm Springs” (2018), among the first made outside of the studio. Characters dressed in ’60s dresses in the background described with elements out of the context of that time as example of rupture of the perfect world, after all “… each human being carries with him/her an inner rupture, even if she wears the best Sunday dress”. Olaf made use of black and white to create series that entered the history of photography, soon accompanied by color series including “Paradise”, “Grief”, “Hope”, “Dawn”, “Dusk”, “Rain”, “Berlin”… in recent years the aesthetic adopted by the artist is similar to that of monumental tableaux, not to mention the dreamlike and most suspended atmospheres that have always characterized his poetry.
The Show will be accompanied by the new volume on Erwin Olaf produced by the gallery and published by Silvana.
Erwin Olaf
until February 27th 2021
Paci contemporary gallery
Via Borgo Pietro Wuhrer 53
Brescia IT
