Erwin Olaf's Palm Springs Series at Galerie Rabouan Moussion

The Galerie Rabouan Moussion in Paris is showing Erwin Olaf's latest series, Palm Springs, from May 18 to July 27, 2019. This series concludes a trilogy on cities in transition, following Berlin (2012) and Shanghai (2017). Olaf, who turned 60 in 2019, is celebrated in the Netherlands with a retrospective at the Gemeentemuseum and Fotomuseum in The Hague until June 16, 2019, and a donation of 500 works to the Rijksmuseum in 2018. In France, he is less known but collected by the Fondation Francès and participated in Nuit Blanche 2016. Palm Springs marks a departure from Olaf's studio-bound practice, as he shoots in landscapes for the first time, integrating portrait, still life, and genre scene into a single narrative. The photographs, set in the 1960s-70s, reference David Hockney's Portrait of an Artist (Pool with two figures) in American Dream, Self-Portrait with Alex II. Olaf addresses racism by contrasting a luxurious villa with a hostile landscape where a Black woman and her daughter prepare to picnic, and uses American flags to critique the American Dream. The series introduces a tense imaginary beyond literal symbolism. A book, Erwin Olaf: I'm, is published by Aperture.