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"Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee" is on view at the Met Breuer through September 29th, 2019.
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Seeking Refuge in Art and Imagination— The Legacy of Erwin Olaf
First and foremost, why Erwin Olaf?
Three reasons: the man, his work, and his time. I have known Erwin Olaf’s work from the beginning. He started out as quite controversial—his pictures were sometimes shocking, often with a sexual aspect. You were either intrigued by them or you hated them. He was a one-man avant-garde. I was intrigued.
And I saw how his work developed, and how his power of expression increased. He ended as a respected artist, exhibited in the best museums all over the world, and as the acclaimed photographer of the Dutch Royal Family. His work is in the collection of the Rijksmuseum and was shown alongside Rembrandt and other masters. After his death in 2023, the idea came up for a large retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the leading museum of modern art in the Netherlands. It was visited by a staggering 380,000 people. His work is very personal but always connected to the world around him. He was trained as a journalist and remained outspoken in his political views. He also stood for absolute freedom in those early years, the 1980s. In Amsterdam, you had the Roxy, our Dutch Studio 54, where anything was possible. He stood for liberation of the individual, especially the queer community, and in a time when those liberal values are under attack, I wanted to portray Erwin Olaf and his time.
I’d imagine both actively witnessing and writing a book about the life of someone else is not an easy feat. Can you tell me a little bit about what that process was like?
It was very special to witness someone like Erwin Olaf over the years. I followed him for years, went with him on trips to exhibitions in Munich and Paris, and watched many photographic sessions, like a fly on the wall. But I also spoke with his family, friends, gallery owners, curators, and colleagues like Rineke Dijkstra, who, together with Erwin, was part of a new wave in Dutch photography, although their work was very different.
There was a generation of Dutch photographers who contributed to making photography an art form: Erwin Olaf, Rineke Dijkstra, Inez & Vinoodh, and Dana Lixenberg. Of those photographers, Erwin Olaf and Inez & Vinoodh (who are now based in New York) moved furthest away from “reality,” and both also worked in commercial photography. Rineke Dijkstra became firmly established in the art world, while Dana Lixenberg perhaps remained closest to documentary photography.
In the process of writing and documenting Erwin Olaf’s life, do you think you guys had a creative exchange?
Yes, I think so. The book is of course my work, but over the years we became close, and in a way it was a form of cooperation. And Erwin Olaf was inspired by our project. He asked his models, mostly friends and people he met in the nightlife of the 1980s and 1990s, to come back to his studio and be portrayed again. In this series, Muses, you see a portrait of his generation. In a way, together they form a kind of self-portrait of Erwin.
His work explores themes of identity, loneliness, sexuality, power, and human vulnerability. I think that’s what has made it feel timeless, both during and after his passing. Do you think these themes were something he naturally embodied, or were they deliberately constructed in his work?
That’s difficult to answer. I think the themes you mention were exactly the ones that mattered most to Erwin Olaf. He had lived them, so to speak— he experienced them and transformed them into art. He struggled with accepting his homosexuality, and he also understood loneliness and the feeling of being an outsider through both his own life and observing others.
It came to him naturally in a way, but at the same time he thought deeply about the staging of his photographs and constructed his own world, his own reality, within his work. So it is not purely an intellectual exercise, but it is not entirely spontaneous either.
In the synopsis, you mention that Erwin found his muses in Amsterdam’s Club RoXY. Looking back, how important was that cultural moment in shaping not only Erwin’s career but also the broader artistic and queer communities he became part of?
It was a time of liberation, and Club RoXY was one of its symbols. For Erwin Olaf and many others, it was a refuge, especially for trans people who had nowhere else to go without being discriminated against, and for the queer community more broadly. Everything was mixed, and everything felt possible. It was also one of the first places where XTC and house music became very popular. Erwin was into XTC, though I think he preferred softer drugs.
What is something about Erwin Olaf that readers might not guess about him?
One thing is how much he valued craftsmanship in his art. After spending time working extensively with photoshop and digital image editing, he eventually returned to some of the earliest photographic techniques.
I’ve noticed a lot of young creatives are getting into photography and creative direction nowadays, which I think is great. What advice would you give to those entering the scene, and what do you think Erwin Olaf would advise as well?
Erwin preferred interns who didn’t come from fancy art schools, but from vocational education. In fact, after his untimely passing, the Erwin Olaf Foundation continues to support and help apprentices from those schools. So it is all about craftsmanship, combined with a very personal imagination. “If I want to see reality, I’ll look out the window” was one of his phrases.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from the book?
All of the above. In a time when all kinds of freedoms are being limited, homosexuality is increasingly rejected by some younger groups, the so-called “manosphere” is growing, and imagination is often overshadowed by weapons and war, you can still seek refuge in art and in imagination— and at the same time maintain a fighting spirit to defend the important social rights we cannot afford to lose.
Exporting Possibilities: Amoako Boafo Brings Accra to the World
Emann Odufu: Amoako, I’ve been thinking about your work in terms of cultural export. Maybe even art diplomacy. Not in terms of medium, but in the way someone like Bob Marley exported Jamaican culture globally through music.
With these exhibitions, it feels like you’re carrying Ghana into two very different spaces at once, Los Angeles and Venice. Do you think about your work that way at all, or is that something that only becomes visible from the outside? Larry and Bennett, I’d love for you both to jump in as well.
Amoako Boafo: I create first and foremost for myself and the people around me. I don’t necessarily think about the work in that larger context, but I do make it in a way that allows different people to dream through it differently.
Larry might connect to the work one way. Bennett another way. I like keeping the work open enough for those different readings to exist.
Larry Ossei-Mensah: What I love about Amoako’s work is that it begins from a deeply personal place, his community, the people around him, the people he admires.
I think what you’re describing as cultural export is really a byproduct of the honesty of the practice. At its core he’s really just exporting possibilities.
Bennett Roberts: Before working with Amoako, I knew very little about Ghana. Sometimes it takes a singular artist to open up entirely new conversations.
The Western canon was very narrow for a long time, and artists like Amoako help expand that territory and allow other voices to enter the conversation equally.
LOM: What’s important is that he’s doing it on his own terms. He’s making the work he wants to make and continuing to challenge himself.
The Roberts Projects exhibition especially felt like stepping into his universe. Bringing elements of the studio into the exhibition allowed viewers to experience where the paintings actually come from.
EO: Yes, Amoako, in the Roberts Projects exhibition, you literally exported a piece of home into another space.
So, I’m curious what it meant to bring your studio environment from Accra into the exhibition itself, especially since architecture seems increasingly important to your practice.
AB: LA has been a space where a lot happened for me creatively, but I wanted Accra to remain part of the conversation. So often paintings leave home, get shipped abroad, and never return.
I wanted collectors to understand the space the work was actually made in. It wasn’t about reinventing my practice. It was about extending the conversation. Architecture became a collaborative way to dream further and shape the energy I wanted people to feel.
EO: Your work has always been rooted in portraiture, but it feels like the portraits are doing something different now, less about depiction and more about presence or interiority.
How has your relationship to portraiture shifted over time?
AB: I actually don’t think it has fundamentally changed. Earlier you referenced Bob Marley, and I think that comparison makes sense in terms of expression. Marley used reggae as his language to communicate everything.
Portraiture is my language. Every painting carries a different feeling, movement, and intention, but portraiture remains the vehicle. The challenge of it keeps me thinking and solving problems. So, the language hasn’t changed, but I’m constantly refining it.
LOM: The paintings almost function like a diaristic form of expression. Instead of writing poetry, Amoako paints it.
What’s exciting is that the work remains deeply honest. He would paint whether people were looking or not. And over time you begin seeing subtle shifts, embroidery, texture, new materials, expanding the vocabulary of the work without abandoning its foundation.
EO: Your use of finger painting feels instinctive, almost like a return to mark-making before refinement. What’s interesting is seeing that gesture enter spaces like Venice, spaces built around very different ideas of painting and refinement.
Do you think about that tension?
AB: I think first about the characters in the paintings and how to make spaces safe for them. Once you leave the continent, there are different kinds of pressures and struggles.
My responsibility is not simply to place these figures into a space and hope they survive. So when I think about Venice, I think about process and intervention. The architecture and institutions have to adapt to what I’m bringing.
EO: Can you talk a little more about the process?
AB: It’s difficult to fully explain because the process is entirely intuitive. There’s no fixed routine. Sometimes I wake up at 1am and work until sunrise. Sometimes I spend an entire day in the studio without touching a painting because I haven’t found the solution yet.
The process can involve tennis, movement, observation, conversation, seeing someone wearing a certain color combination on the street and suddenly realizing what a painting needs. The work evolves through living.
LOM: I think it’s intuition, improvisation, and observation. Amoako is deeply attentive to movement and daily life.
He’s living life while remaining fully committed to the work, and you can feel that energy in the paintings.
AB: The work is my life, so I cannot neglect it.
BR: What makes the finger painting powerful is that everyone has done it as a child. It creates an immediate bond between the viewer and the work.
What’s important is that it never felt like a gimmick. People respond to the work viscerally before they even intellectualize it.
LOM: A lot of traditional conversations around the canon never seriously considered artists from the continent. What I appreciate about Amoako’s position is that he isn’t adapting himself to the space. The space has to adapt to him.
That’s what makes it an intervention.
EO: And to me that brings it back to the idea of art diplomacy, especially in Venice where artists are representing different cultural identities simultaneously.
The Bob Marley comparison comes back here for me. Marley exported not just music, but Jamaican culture, language, spirituality, and identity globally. Part of Jamaica’s outsized cultural presence comes through that legacy alongside histories like Windrush and migration.
As someone without direct ties to Ghana, I experience your work as offering clues about Ghanaian life and culture, almost as an invitation into that world.
LOM: What anchors all of this is love. There’s love and intentionality embedded in the work.
Sometimes you can’t force people into a conversation directly. You have to draw them in slowly, almost like an Anansi spider weaving a web. And once people enter the work, it begins revealing itself layer by layer.
EO: After a certain point, the work takes on a life of its own beyond you privately. Amoako, how do you navigate that moment where the work becomes larger culturally or historically?
AB: Everything I’ve built, whether dot.atelier or the paintings themselves, I’ve built with the intention that it should outgrow me.
I want there to be an archive and a foundation people can continue building upon after I’m gone. The work comes from an honest and joyful place, and once I share it with the world, what people do with it is ultimately up to them.
EO: Do you think the attention that your work has received in the past few years, has clarified your vision or forced you to protect it more intentionally?
AB: I think I’m always improving. Once you think you’ve arrived, that’s when you begin descending.
The reactions to the work have definitely made me think more carefully about protection, documentation, and preserving the archive around the practice. I want future generations to be able to return to the work and understand what I was actually trying to do.
BR: Once work enters the world, it can take on a life of its own culturally and economically. No artist can fully control that.
What I admire is that Amoako remains grounded in the work itself regardless of outside speculation or market forces.
EO: I want to shift into dot.atelier because it also speaks directly to legacy. Can you talk about how it grew alongside your practice?
AB: dot.atelier combines art and sports because those are the two things that shaped my life. I wanted to create opportunities where people wouldn’t feel they had to leave Ghana in order to succeed.
The foundation supports artistic development, but also tennis incubation and youth programming. At its core, it’s about helping people in my community imagine larger possibilities for themselves.
LOM: What’s exciting is seeing it grow from an idea into a real infrastructure. When I visited recently, there was an artist reconnecting with the Ghanaian diaspora alongside another artist based directly in Ghana. That exchange is incredibly important.
The project is about creating opportunities, resources, and long-term infrastructure for future generations.
EO: Hearing Larry describe the residency and about artists exploring diaspora-continent connections made me think about my own Guyanese background and the quote on quote unspoken Ghana-Guyana connection. In the US people constantly confuse Guyana with Ghana, but there’s also a real diasporic linkage through ancestry and history. A good amount of the Afro- Guyanese population in Guyana can track their roots to Guyana. Also a huge cultural reverence for Gold on both sides. Haha it's sort of a rabbit hole, so I’ll stop there.
It also made me think about the larger emergence of new cultural infrastructures across places like Accra, Lagos, Dakar, Mumbai, or Seoul reshaping contemporary culture and the future of the art world itself. Amoako, I wonder if you see yourself and your work both artistically and with non-profits as part of that movement.
AB: Honestly, I wasn’t thinking about it in those terms. My focus was simply on creating opportunities that I wished existed earlier for people back home.
The larger conversations emerged naturally from trying to close that gap.
LOM: I think the conversation is less about emergence and more about recognition. These places were always producing culture. The West is simply catching up.
Artists are realizing they don’t necessarily need validation from traditional Western centers anymore. If the work is powerful enough, people will come to them.
BR: For me, curiosity is everything. The most exciting future is a genuinely global one where new ideas emerge from many different places and experiences rather than a single dominant center.
EO: And Bennett, I think you’ve done an incredible job positioning yourself within that ecosystem and helping connect these conversations globally.
BR: Thank you I’d also say Larry is extremely important because he travels, visits studios, and helps connect these different creative ecosystems. Nothing happens in a vacuum.
EO: I remember first discovering Larry years ago through his “Young Global” instagram handle years ago and immediately recognizing that he was building a unique perspective through travel, studio visits, and cultural exchange.
Final question for Amoako. What has this Venice body of work required from you mentally, emotionally, even spiritually? Does this moment feel like arrival or transformation?
AB: Lately I’ve been spending much more intimate time with the paintings, sometimes even sleeping in the studio. I’m enjoying the process of problem solving more deeply now.
But I don’t think of Venice as arriving somewhere. I’m still searching. The work is always about finding new solutions. Even when I’m playing tennis or moving through daily life, I’m subconsciously thinking about the paintings and how to make them breathe differently.
For me, the process is everything.
BR: I see Venice as another step upward, another platform within an ongoing progression.
LOM: I agree. It’s another building block. Amoako is deeply self-motivated and constantly challenges himself creatively.
Like Kobe preparing for the final shot, the work comes from years of discipline and repetition. When the moment arrives, it’s simply another shot he’s prepared for all along.
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Stu Mead: the aesthetics of innocence and the viewer who can no longer look away.
Nabokov wrote Lolita and was called a genius. Araki made Mysterious Skin and was celebrated for his courage. Sally Mann photographed her own children in ways that made America deeply uneasy. In each of these forms, what ultimately protected the work was the same thing: a narrative distance and an authorial position that tells the audience how to feel and therefore lets them off the hook. The monster is named. The viewer is guided to the correct emotional exit.
Mead builds no such exit. He does not contextualize, does not reassure the viewer about his own intentions, or theirs. That absence of a moral safety net is precisely what makes his work unbearable to many.
Whether that discomfort is a provocation or a mirror may say more about the viewer than the canvas; discomfort, in art, is rarely accidental, and the question worth asking is not whether these paintings are difficult to look at. They are. The question is what that difficulty is made of: is it outrage, or is it recognition? And if it is recognition, what exactly are we recognizing?
What fascinates me about your work is the total absence of an escape route for the viewer. Authors like Nabokov in Lolita provide a moral compass or a structural distance that tells the audience how to feel. You don't build that exit. Why leave the viewer entirely alone in front of the canvas?
To be honest, it’s not deliberate or intentional on my part - though listening to you, maybe it should be! Nabokov had to deal with the specific time he was living in, which probably dictated a certain distance between the narrator and the piece of art. I wish I could claim I have an intellectual master plan, but I don't. My process is much more immediate : I just want to get a reaction, whether that means making people laugh or shocking them. I have no real program. If I tried to manufacture something calculated just to be "interesting" or palatable to an audience, nobody would give a shit about it.
Your palette is soft, almost tender, but the image lands like a fist. Is this fairy-tale aesthetic simply the most honest way for you to tell these stories?
Folktales and traditional fairy tales had a massive, foundational influence on how I learned to see and make art. It’s an honest language for me. I’m very drawn to comedy and the mechanics of stand-up comedians. The response to a great joke on stage has to be instantaneous. You plant a thought directly into the viewer's mind, and they process it at lightning speed - either they reject it completely, or they burstinto an explosive laugh. That’s the visceral, rapid-fire connection I look for. I want that immediate, unfiltered connection that bypasses the analytical brain.
Is there a difference for you between painting to provoke and painting to expose? Which impulse actually drives you?
I think it’s about provoking a deeper recognition. Those coarse and unappealing male figures in my paintings are a confrontation with the unvarnished reality of human desire. It’s about taking the vulnerability, the awkwardness and the dark corners of the mind and highlighting it. My depictions of the masculine gaze aren't flattering, but they are honest. It’s an invitation for the viewers to stop projecting monsters onto external headlines or distant media figures, and instead recognize that these complexities and shadows cross the minds of everyday people. We all carry these internal strangenesses, and my art simply brings them into the light.
There is an underground feel to that raw honesty. Is there a political edge to your practice?
I grew up loving underground comics like Robert Crumb, which absolutely shaped me. There is a political side to that scene, my scene. It’s a way of looking at the world without the usual polite filters, much like the satirical cartoons I’ve always loved.
A painting of yours was destroyed in 2004. Artists resigned from galleries in protest in 2008. That was before cancel culture had a name. Now it has an infrastructure. Does that make your work more necessary, or simply more exhausting?
If I made my art just to make people angry, I wouldn't think very highly of that kind of artist. But if the culture reacts with that level of anger on its own, it means you're touching a raw nerve. It’s fascinating that putting some lines and colors on a piece of paper can provoke someone to that extreme of a physical response. It means something is happening.
At the same time, people get obsessed with dark phenomena like the Epstein case because it confirms our worst ideas about our species. It taps into ancient fears, like the story of Bluebeard. In my paintings, the animals - which are always male - act as a sort of metaphor or satire for those human impulses. But I don't see my work as a commentary on wealthy power structures. Incredibly rich men can do horrible things because they have no financial restrictions, but poor men can do equally horrible things. Men are just capable of terrible violence.
Can an image be genuinely disturbing and genuinely necessary at the same time?
I don't really think in terms of my art being "necessary" or not. I don't have a grand moral lesson to give, and I'm certainly not here to lecture anyone. Back in the 80s punk period, it was very trendy to make books full of car crashes, murders and medical gore just to shock people. I always hated that and avoided it completely.
I don't feel I have any business telling other people how to think or how to feel about it. What I like isn't a political debate, it's what we call a frisson - that quick, physical reaction where unease and humor hit you at the exact same time.
The only true failure is total indifference - when people just walk right past the canvas without even looking at it. If they stop, look and react, it means the image bypassed their analytical filters and a genuine current passed from my brain to theirs. When they engage with that intensity, they create a continuity of my work.
