Naples, Fondazione Mannajuolo

From Friday, Nov. 15, 2024, the exhibition season of Al Blu di Prussia Gallery (Via Gaetano Filangieri, 42 – Naples) – kicks off with the exhibition “I Am” by Erwin Olaf, curated by Maria Savarese.

The work of photographer Erwin Olaf, who died prematurely in 2023, is hosted for the first time in Naples by Fondazione Mannajuolo in collaboration with Studio Erwin Olaf and Paci contemporary gallery.

Erwin Olaf was the official portrait painter of the Dutch royal family in 2017 and designed the national euro coin for King Willem-Alexander in 2013. He has exhibited in the world’s most important museums, and his works are in numerous private and public collections, such as the Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, United States; Art Progressive Collection, United States; and the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. The first public retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, is being prepared for fall 2025.

“Between the 1980s and 1990s,” writes curator Maria Savarese, ‘Olaf began to orient the documentary and provocative ’visual activism’ of his early days-as Shirely den Hartog, his longtime collaborator and now at the helm of the Studio, called it-to a more reflective, thoughtful, technically constructed vision of photography, always made indoors, with a look toward early Dutch art.”
In these images the scene has become more complex, the construction of the sets has taken on cinematic tones with specific references to the 1950s, the atmosphere is animated by a sense of suspension of time, space and the emotions of the protagonists, Hopperian characters, enigmatic, often solitary, suspended in a dimension of perpetual waiting, between absence and presence.
Along with the photographs, six video art works made by Olaf between 2003 and 2020 are screened in the gallery’s cinema room.

On display are a selection of shots, on loan from the Paci contemporary gallery, made from the early 2000s through 2020, taken from the Royal Blood (2000), Rain (2004), Fall (2008), Grief (2008), Dawn (2009), Keyole (2012), Hamburg (2014), Shanghai (2017), Indochine (2017) and Palm Springs (2018) series, which are part of the author’s full artistic maturity.