Erwin Olaf .- B&W. Early Works.

15/Nov/2014 - 17/Jan/2015

Fifteen years have passed since our first solo exhibition of ERWIN OLAF in the Espacio Minimo Gallery. At the time, the show hung at our former location in Murcia. Since then, we have organized four more Olaf exhibitions in the Madrid location. In those fifteen years, Olaf has played an important role in three of our group exhibitions – Art & Fashion No.1, and the commemorations of our fifteenth and twentieth anniversaries in the gallery. We are always excited to show his work, and we continue to show his latest photographs in our booth in national and international art fairs after a decade and a half.

In that first show in November 1999 and since, we have highlighted the important role that color has played in Olaf´s different series, the most recent of which being Mature, evolving from a bold, daring palette that shines out from within the photograph – as seen in Royal Blood –, almost offensive – as in Paradise, Rouge – to a more intimate, subdued palette, limited to a confined spectrum of shades – Grief, Hotel, Keyhole, Berlin –, and even flirting with an ostensible monochromatic color scheme – Dusk, Dawn.

But before that first encounter with our gallery, ERWIN OLAF had realized an earlier project, a series executed in a purer black and white format, one which seems to lack sufficient attention to it, perhaps eclipsed by the brilliance of his subsequent works, but one that was already established and personal, in which some of the most definitive characteristics of his work begin to appear, and from which one can discern the inspirations of many subsequent series by the artist.

These are the early works in black and white, photographs never hung before in our past shows of the artist, that we have chosen to bring back so that we may, with the perspective of the past that time provides us, and taking into account the work that followed, we can judge the series with a new, more accurate metric.

ERWIN OLAF (Hilversum, The Netherlands, 1959), lives and works in Amsterdam. He has had solo exhibitions, among others, at the Fodor Museum in Amsterdam (1990), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1992), Frankfurter Kunst Verein Frankfurt (1993), Kunsthal in Rotterdam (1993) Fotofestival Naarden (1995), Ludwig Museum in Cologne (1998), Museum of Modern Art in Hasselt (2001), D’Arte Provincia di Nuoro Museum (2002), Museum Sztuki Lodz (2003), Groninger Museum, Groninger (2003), Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna (2005 ), Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2005), Australian Centre of Photography in Sidney (2005), The Hague Museum of Photography, The Hague (2008), South Eastern Centre for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem (2008), Photo Museum Antwerp in Antwerp (2009) … and some important group shows.