Erwin Olaf Receives Royal Medal of Honor
His Majesty the King Willem-Alexander awarded the Medal of Honor for Art and Science of the Order of the House of Orange to photographer Erwin Olaf on March 13, 2023 at Noordeinde Palace.
The medal of honor is awarded to persons of exceptional merit in the fields of art and science. The award is also based on a special bond with the Royal Household.
Erwin Olaf has been photographing for over forty years, using a bold approach to portraiture to address themes of ethnicity, sexual diversity and economic inequality. His work has been shown in exhibitions and museums worldwide and has received international awards. The Rijksmuseum, for example, has over 500 works from Olaf’s oeuvre in its collection. In addition to his artistry, Erwin Olaf is committed to professional education with a heart for craftsmanship.
Erwin Olaf has created several portraits of King Willem-Alexander, Queen Máxima and their daughters. He designed a new euro coin with the King’s image in 2013 and took the official state photos in 2018.
Read statement in Dutch
ABOUT Erwin Olaf
Erwin Olaf is an internationally exhibiting artist whose diverse practice centers around society’s marginalized individuals, including people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community. In 2019 Olaf became a Knight of the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands after 500 works from his oeuvre were added to the collection of the Rijksmuseum. Taco Dibbits, Rijksmuseum director, called Olaf “one of the most important photographers of the final quarter of the 20th century”.
In 2018, Olaf completed a triptych of monumental photographic and filmic tableaux portraying periods of seismic change in major world cities, and the citizens embraced and othered by their urban progress. Like much of his work, it is contextualized by complex race relations, the devastation of economic divisions, and the complications of sexuality. Olaf has maintained an activistic approach to equality throughout his 40-year career after starting out documenting pre-AIDS gay liberation in Amsterdam’s nightlife in the 1980s.
A bold and sometimes controversial approach has earned the artist a number of prestigious collaborations, from Vogue and Louis Vuitton, to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. He served as the official portrait artist for the Dutch royal family in 2017, and designed the national side of the euro coins for King Willem-Alexander in 2013. He has been awarded the Netherlands’ prestigious Johannes Vermeer Award, as well as Photographer of the Year at the International Color Awards, and Kunstbeeld magazine’s Dutch Artist of the Year.
Erwin Olaf has exhibited worldwide, including Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Málaga, Spain; Museu da Imagem e do Som, São Paulo, Brazil; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile. In the spring of 2019, Olaf’s work was the subject of a double exhibition at Kunstmuseum The Hague and The Hague Museum of Photography, as well as a solo exhibition at the Shanghai Center of Photography. In 2021, Erwin Olaf had his first solo exhibition Im Wald at Galerie Ron Mandos and mounted a large survey exhibition at Kunsthalle München, Germany.
Olaf’s work is included in numerous private and public collections, such as the Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk Museum, both in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, The Netherlands, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, United States; Art Progressive Collection, United States, and the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia.
Erwin Olaf was born in 1959 in Hilversum, The Netherlands
He lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Visit the artist’s website here.
