Paci contemporary gallery is pleased to announce “In memoriam: Erwin Olaf (1959-2023)”, a celebration of Erwin Olaf’s life and photographic work, a retrospective across the artist’s four-decade career.

Erwin Olaf passed away in 2023, and the exhibition at Paci contemporary aims to be a celebration of Olaf’s monumental contribution to the world of photography and the visual arts in general, a celebration following numerous international recognitions.
In fact, after his passing, #Hope 5, among his most iconic works, was included in the “Gallery of Honor” at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam as a tribute to his work, and in 2025 the Stedelijk Museum, is planning a retrospective exhibition.

The exhibition is realized in collaboration with the Studio Olaf, directed by Shirley den Hartog the artist’s right-hand and manager, and the Erwin Olaf Foundation, created last September with the aim of perpetuating Olaf’s artistic work but also his activism and struggle for equality, freedom of speech and diversity.

Shirley den Hartog herself will attend the opening night.

The walls of Paci contemporary will narrate a journey through the artist’s entire production starting with “Chessmen,” the series that made him internationally famous by allowing him to win the Young European Photographer in 1988, up to the latest projects “April Fool” and “Im Wald” (2020), through the iconic, “Paradise” (2001), “Rain” (2004), “Hope” (2005), “Grief” (2007), “Fall” (2008), “Keyhole” (2011-2013) and the trilogy “Berlin-Shanghai-Palm Springs” (2012-2018).

A journey from the documentary and provocative visual activism of his early works, emblematic of a clear subversion of social norms and a challenge to the taboos of modern society, to a more thoughtful, technically constructed photography, almost always made indoors and with an eye on ancient Dutch art, but still involved in social issues.
His gradually more complex set designs, the cinematically cut sets with specific references to the 1950s, the suspended atmosphere where the subjects portrayed, often solitary characters, seem suspended in a dimension of perpetual waiting, make Olaf one of the great masters of contemporary mise-en-scène.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the volume edited by Walter Guadagnini, with an introduction by Erwin Olaf himself, published by Silvana Editoriale in 2020.

The exhibition will be open until September 30, 2025.