Erwin Olaf: Stages is reviewed in Observer, "How Erwin Olaf Created Art at the Seams of Lived Experience," by Su Ertekin-Taner. Read an excerpt below:
Olaf justified his fascination with staging in a New York Times interview, one of the artist’s last before his death in September of 2023: “I could stage my own fantasy, my own dream world, my own surrealism [in the studio].”
Edwynn Houk Gallery centered this dream-like, synthetic quality in the recently closed retrospective, “Erwin Olaf: Stages,” which did a fine job of showing how Olaf mapped his visual fantasies onto the world’s props. Of the twenty-three in the exhibition, The Farewell (2018) from Olaf’s Palm Springs collection stood out. In it, we see a young gay couple—one of the pair uniformed in some sort of military apparel, the other bare save for shorts—touching foreheads in the middle of a mod ’60s-era living room. A large rucksack stands at attention behind the uniformed half of the pair. Their bodies, caught in an intimate goodbye, seem to be held up in the universe by a string. It’s clear the pair are on the brink of something sinister, like a secret spoken under breath. Off to war? Extended separation? A breakup? It’s unclear, but the image is just one tug away–one frame away, really–from the opening of its seams, from a shift into the explicit. Regardless, the tension remains, amplified by Olaf’s intentional obscurity.
