News Features: Erwin Olaf — Freedom
Following its highly anticipated opening, the Stedelijk Museum’s exhibition Erwin Olaf — Freedom has received broad media attention and thoughtful reviews across the Dutch press and television. The exhibition is the first major retrospective of Olaf’s work since his passing in 2023. Spanning over forty years of work, the exhibition includes Erwin’s photography, video, and installation, including never-before-seen archival material from Studio Erwin Olaf.
In Het Parool, art critic Kees Keijer calls Freedom a long-overdue retrospective that finally fulfils one of Olaf’s personal wishes, to be shown at the Stedelijk.
The review traces his evolution from raw street photography to meticulously staged compositions. Keijer highlights how the exhibition sheds light on lesser-known aspects of Olaf’s practice, from his photojournalistic roots to his later reflections on loss, beauty, and mortality.
The article also recalls Olaf’s perfectionism and his shift from spontaneous moments to complete control in the studio, describing the show as “perfectly lit” yet deeply human.
In her review for NRC, Cathelijne Blok describes the exhibition as a chance to “look behind the shine” of Olaf’s iconic images and rediscover their emotional depth. The article emphasises how the Stedelijk focuses not only on his celebrated large-scale photographs but also on sketches, early experiments, and unseen studio material that reveal the artist’s working process. According to NRC, the museum “lets you look at his work again,” showing both the glamour and the vulnerability that defined Olaf’s vision.
Every year, Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant compiles a list of the best photography books of the year. This year, Mark Moorman, Merel Bem and Arno Haijtema have picked out the book Erwin Olaf – Freedom that came out as a publication together with the exhibition.
Arno Haijtema writes about the exhibition in De Volkskrant. He sees the exhibition as a final stamp of timelessness on the oeuvre of Erwin Olaf. He states that while the exhibition showcases a wide array of happy and joyfull pictures, a feeling of melancholia dominates.
In the Numéro Netherlands article, reviewer Marek Bartek praises the exhibition for looking past the photographer’s “perfectly staged glamour” to reveal the artist’s full scope, including his “process, conversation, and doubt.” Bartek concludes that the show successfully reveals the “deeply human” and activist core of Olaf’s work, ultimately confirming that he “found his place” at the Stedelijk Museum.
De Volkskrant included Erwin Olaf’s Freedom in their list of 10 best exhibitions of 2025. What all selected exhibitions have in common is that they concern themselves with people and things that are rarely seen and often overlooked.
NOS Nieuwsuur also featured Erwin Olaf — Freedom in a dedicated segment, offering an inside look at the exhibition and its installation. The report presents interviews with curator Charl Landvreugd, Rein Wolfs, director of Stedelijk Museum and Shirley den Hartog, director of Studio Erwin Olaf, who reflect on Olaf’s legacy and the intimate materials now made public for the first time, from early contact sheets to his final self-portraits.
The video underscores how Freedom not only celebrates Olaf’s visual precision but also confronts his lifelong search for vulnerability, identity, and control.
ABOUT Erwin Olaf
Erwin Olaf (1959-2023) was known for his diverse practice that centered 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 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 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 was 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. In 2023, His Majesty the King Willem-Alexander awarded him the Medal of Honor for Art and Science of the Order of the House of Orange.
Erwin Olaf 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.
Visit the artist’s website here.
