That feeling of discomfort, awkwardness and uncomfortable expectation: Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf captures the very essence of waiting in his recent series Waiting (2014). Opening in October, Olaf's film and photographic installation is a 360-degree psychological experiment. The audience watches a woman waiting, mimicking their own role in an...

Born in 1959 in Hilversum in the Netherlands, Erwin Olaf studied journalism in Utrecht. News writing wasn't the right fit, so he was delighted when an insightful teacher proposed photography and put a camera in his hands. A photojournalist documenting the world around him at first, the domain of fantasy had always fascinated the perpetual dreamer...

Gemiddeld een jaar werkt Jasper de Beijer aan zijn driedimensionale maquettes, die in de loop der jaren steeds groter zijn geworden. Eerst bouwde hij ze op een schaal van 1:100, toen 1:10 en nu zijn ze meestal 1:1. Vervolgens maakt hij er een foto van, wat secondenwerk is in vergelijking met de monnikenarbeid die gemoeid is met het maken van de...

From nightlife-fuelled provocateur to Rembrandt-inspired portraitist, Erwin Olaf – 60 this year – continues to approach his subject with theatrical flair.

D’emblée, on est hypnotisé par les teintes acides et fruitées de Guy Yanai. Le peintre, né en 1977 en Israël, a fréquenté aussi bien la Parsons The New School for Design de New York que l’École d’art de Pont-Aven en France. En ressortent une galerie d’images aux formes géométriques et colorées, de larges mosaïques où les couches épaisses de...

Midway through her exhibition 'Found' at Tintype Gallery, Alice Browne and I discussed her work, introducing it through the 1973 children's book 'Seawater and the Dragon' by Luciana Chetwynd and her children. Briefly, little Seawater climbs the mountain above his village to discover a depressed dragon and a cave of nightmarish beasts. His Dad the...

AMSTERDAM—If there’s a single work that encapsulates the artistry of Erwin Olaf, a leading Dutch photographer known for meticulously staged pictures that challenge social taboos and explore human frailty, it might be his 2005 portrait of a young woman in a yellow dress from the 'Hope' series. The brunette with a yellow ribbon in her hair seems...

At its core, what is your work about? Our world is packed with an abundance of images that constantly bombard us, and inevitably much of our reality today is filtered through cinema and media imagery. I question the limits of art as I question my own. While I use the language of art (amongst other tools for investigating our so-called...

There's more than meets the eye in Amsterdam-based artist Jasper de Beijer's stark renditions of historical events, like the 1993 Waco siege, visualized above.

Robert Minervini: Until Tomorrow Comes | A site-specific exhibition of nine interrelated large-scale paintings intended to be viewed and considered as a single, continuous panoramic landscape.

In addition to its ample cruelties and endlessly confounded sense of 'it can't go on like this much longer, can it?', 2017 has also been a year of profound historical torsion, marked by the return of specific figures and fears wrongly presumed to have been left in the present's wake. Consider, for instance, the starkly renewed appearance of fascists...

There is a moment in Johan Grimonprez's short arthouse documentary | blue orchids | (2017) when Chris Hedges, former war correspondent and now well-known leftwing author and activist, describes the emotional toll of being exposed to the trauma of war –...

The question, possibly of the century: How did America end up with a reality-TV president? Might it have been Russian hackers or disenfranchised voters? blue orchids (2017), a film by the New York-based artist Johan Grimonprez showing at Sean Kelly, proposes a virtually incontrovertible answer: the uncertain dependability of 'truth.'

In describing the indomitable corporations that shape the global arms trade, Riccardo Privitera, star of Johan Grimonprez's film blue orchids (2017), takes a long draw from his Merit cigarette, and shapes his stout fingers into a claw. Like an octopus, he suggests, Lockheed Martin dictates U.S. foreign policy by infiltrating all three branches...

Surrounded by large canvas filled with floating geometric shapes overlaying slashes and other transparent forms of colour, my eye is attracted to the drawings of the human figure contained within these otherwise abstract paintings – the body, crossed fingers, a head that appears to be looking backwards.

Johan Grimonprez doesn't want audiences to get out their handkerchiefs; he wants them to get out their protest signs, their megaphones and their voting ballots. Whether documentaries have that ability is sadly open for debate, but Shadow World, Grimonprez's superb, gut-punching exploration of the global arms trade is the sort of catalyst to...

The Italian photographer, Paolo Ventura, is known for constructing and photographing stylized dioramas to tell visual stories with a cinematic quality. Automaton, a series featured previously on Photo Booth, is a retelling of a story from his childhood, set in Nazi-occupied Italy. In 2013, Ventura, who had been living in New York, returned to...

Le fascinant photographe néerlandais expose pour la première fois en grand en France, et dévoile ses installations, films et photographies ensemble, combinés par séries. Clowns grimaçants ou hiératiques, femmes au chignon parfait dans leurs intérieurs design: les tableaux photographiques et les vidéos d’Erwin Olaf suggèrent des histoires...

Blinking is the moment in photography we all hate. You know – all those photos from birthdays and dinner parties when your eyes are half shut. But last year I found I was intrigued by an image I had made when a girl model blinked just as I was pushing the button.