Early in his photography career, Dutch artist Erwin Olaf photographed male models wearing women's hats. In one of these black and white photographs, Hennie (1985), a nude male model leans against Olaf's frame, staring at his implied audience. On top of his head is a velvet, black chapeau with a wide tail. The model's androgyny and eccentric sartorial choice aside, it is the plasticity of the image that keeps the viewer watching. Olaf adjusted every aspect of the image—the model's subtle extended lip, her curved and shadowy left shoulder, the way she looked and the angle of her pose—with finesse and skill.
I Ladies Hats series it was one of the first collections in which Olaf played with über-artificiality, and it would be his unique style of playing on the wall with precision that would define much of his work during the forty years following the first photographs of the series. Olaf justified his fascination by playing in a New York Times interviewone of the artist's last words before his death in September of 2023: “I can make my dream, my dream world, my surrealism. [in the studio].”
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The Edwynn Houk Gallery focuses on this dream-like, artificial quality of the recently closed past, “Erwin Olaf: Sections,” which you did a great job of showing how Olaf mapped his physical thoughts onto the world's systems. Of the twenty-three in the show, Saying goodbye (2018) from Olaf's Palm Springs collection stood out. In it, we see a young gay couple—one of the couple wearing some sort of military uniform, the other naked save for shorts—touching foreheads in the middle of a mod '60s-era residence. A large sack stood behind the uniformed half of the two. Their bodies, caught in a close embrace, seem to be caught by a thread across the universe. It's clear that these two are on the brink of something bad, like a secret spoken under their breath. Did you go to war? Extended separation? Separation? It's not clear yet, but the picture is just one frame away—one frame, really—from opening at its seams, from transition to transparency. Even so, the tension is still there, heightened by Olaf's deliberate obfuscation.
Olaf likewise made other pictures—The Board Room (2004) from The rain collection, Boxing school (2005) from Trust collection and Caroline (2007) from Sadness collection – on the verge of change. Loneliness plagues all three. A man and a woman stand perpendicularly in board room, the man looking behind the woman and the woman away from the man. In Boxing schooltwo men—perhaps, friends—look at opposite corners of the ring. In CarolineCaroline, known as Caroline, sits naked on the couch facing away from the lens; a half-full rocks glass sits forgotten on the side table across from him.
For all their high production and extreme staging, these pictures are not scrubbed for dirty interactions. Whatever disagreements, emotional trauma, power struggles or external pressures preceded or succeeded during the captivity are left open, still inside minute but not shown emphatically.
Erwin Olaf died a little over a year ago, after a twenty-year battle with emphysema, and looking back in “stages” was especially meaningful as it marked the anniversary of his passing. Even in our most refined, polished moments, we are made up of seams that threaten to split apart, revealing cracks where our dirty human stuff resides, like Olaf's “crack” of health issues. Through his photographs, Olaf invited us to reject the negative view of our stitching—stitched tight or frayed—and enjoy the art of it.
“I have a hoarse voice, walking up the stairs is getting easier and long-haul flights are getting harder,” Olaf said of his illness, but also cited it as a source of inspiration. “You go deep inside, and explore new subjects.”
