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| ACP Elegance and Perversity Exhibition |
 Photography Exhibition: Elegance and Perversity
Opening Thursday 14 July 2005 6 - 8pm Exhibition runs Friday 15 July - Sunday 28 August 2005 Tue - Sun: 11.00am - 6.00pm Galleries One, Two and Foyer Ageing pin-ups, slain royals, dysfunctional families, debauched designer bodies. Erwin Olaf brings his incisive wit and vision to create a satirical portrait of our contemporary consumer society. Specially curated for Australian Centre for Photography, this solo exhibition brings to Australia recent works that have delighted and outraged audiences across Europe. Erwin Olaf: Elegance and Perversity is an exhibition curated from photographic series undertaken between 1999 and 2005 by Dutch artist Erwin Olaf. An exuberant and imaginative photographer and film maker, Olaf has carved a career from staging his own realities, and revealing an ambiguous world where the division between fiction and fact has dissolved. Vibrant, controversial and baroque, series like Mature, Royal Blood, Fashion Victims and Paradise the Club, as well as the recent and more introspective Separation and Rain have become portraits of an era. Olaf's photographic subjects run the gamut of extremes from the publicly scrutinised celebrity to the isolated family unit. In this exhibition we encounter aged supermodels, slain monarchs, fetishised and commercially branded bodies, depraved violators and voyeurs, a loving if bizarre mother and son and a quietly crumbling family waiting for dinner. Olaf's staged compositions allude to traditional European painting techniques, drawing his very contemporary work into an ongoing historical discourse. The artist subtly manipulates his images by heightening the use of chiaroscuro and colour saturation, charging his photographs with dramatic tension. The initial seductive and elegant appearance of his images gives way to awareness of increasingly anxious, perverse, and constrained settings. Olaf is an artist who dares to denounce and push humorously at the boundaries of established norms relating to sexual taboo, hypocrisy, violence, hyper-consumerism and social control. |
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About Australian Centre for Photography (ACP)
Established in 1973, the ACP opened the doors of its first gallery in Paddington
Street, in 1974. In 1981 the Centre moved to Oxford Street where it remains today.
It is now Australia's longest running contemporary art space.
It is the ACP's mission to promote and enrich the understanding of photo-based art
in Australia and this is achieved through a dynamic mix of exhibition, education and
publication. In its blend of activities and range of photographic media, the Centre
is unique in Australia.
ACP opened a Workshop in 1976. Originally in a separate building, this is now housed
within the Centre in Oxford Street and includes black and white and colour darkroom
facilities, a digital suite, lighting studio and library. In 1983 ACP launched the
journal Photofile. It is now the leading photo-based art magazine in Australia,
available through newsagents and specialist bookshops nationally.
Currently located in the heart of Paddington, Sydney's gallery district, ACP houses
two exhibition spaces; a foyer display area and a Project Wall for emerging artists;
an extensive workshop with comprehensive curriculum and public access facilities; a
specialist bookshop and library.
The ACP is a not-for-profit organisation supported by the NSW Government through the
NSW Ministry for the Arts, the Australia Council, the Australian Government's arts
funding and advisory body, and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of
the Australian, State and Territory Governments. The ACP raises over half of its
revenue from non-government sources.
