SIGNED; Olaf Martens - Olaf Martens - 1994

IMPRESSIVE BOOK by well-known German photographer Olaf Martens, born 1963, whose fashion and advertising photography brought him international recognition.

Signed by the artist.
I GUARANTEE THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE SIGNATURE.

WITH ORIGINAL DUSTJACKET.

VERY FRESH CONDITION.

"Olaf Martens grew up in Nordhausen and studied photography from 1985 to 1992 at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig (HGB) in Leipzig, including two years as a master student under Wolfgang G. Schröter and Helfried Strauß. His contemporaries include artists of the Leipzig School such as Neo Rauch, Tim Eitel, and Tilo Baumgärtel.
Since the late 1990s, Olaf Martens has produced photographs for PR and advertising campaigns for international clients. He has created photo essays and contributions for publications including FAZ Magazin, Der Spiegel, Stern, Harper’s Bazaar Russia, Focus Magazin, Max, Die Welt, Art, Geo Spezial, Merian, Glamour, Wiener, and Park Avenue. Alongside this work, he has continuously pursued independent projects and presented them in numerous exhibitions.
His photographic works often depict contrasts: the seemingly intact, opulent and decadent world and its collapse, the struggle between good and evil, as well as striking and highly intimate portrait photographs of well-known writers and publishers.
In recent years, he has been particularly active in the international photography scene, conducting workshops in Bangkok, Sydney, Moscow, and Prague, and teaching at the EFTI School of Photography in Madrid.
His works are represented, among others, in the collections of Sammlung Goetz and Sammlung F. C. Gundlach, as well as at the Leopold Museum Vienna, the Rhineland State Museum Bonn, and the Moritzburg State Gallery in Halle (Saale). Olaf Martens lives and works in Leipzig."
(Wikipedia)

Edition Stemmle, Kilchberg, Zurich. 1994. First edition, first printing.

Hardcover with dustjacket. 245 x 325 mm. 128 pages. Photos: Olaf Martens. Text by F.C. Gundlach, Klaus Honnef, Wolfgang G. Schröter. Text in German.

Condition:
Inside and outside new, mint, unread, only opened once for the signature; pages at the edges a bit yellowed, what is a production/paper problem. Outside with perfect spine, front and rear side super fresh with very light sunning along the spine. Overall very fine, much better and fresher than usual condition.

Great photobook in very fresh condition - signed, dated and located by the artist: "Olaf Martens. Bergisch-Gladbach. 17.03.2000."

"The photographs of Olaf Martens are often associated with the aesthetic of beautiful young women found in lifestyle magazines. Behind the apparent beauty of the images, one can discern desire, irony, and a certain sense of the bizarre. Martens seeks to penetrate the mechanisms behind image content that has solidified into stereotypes. He frequently photographed in the former GDR and in Russia: scrap-ready nuclear submarines, Russian revue theaters, ballet, and more. The resulting images play with contrasts—decadence and poverty, fat and thin, seductive women set against shabby backdrops, everyday life and the artificial world of the beautiful and the wealthy. Shoes and cars symbolize people’s longings; bras, latex suits, and stockings function as fetishes or armor—but always also as signs of power. Into these constructed pictorial worlds, full of “icons of the zeitgeist”—the first East German Miss Germany, artists, actors, fitness gurus, formerly highly decorated intelligence officers, fashion designers, Russian oligarchs—elements of irritation intrude. Martens relies on irony to examine the methods of fictional construction. He draws on motifs from art history as well as on banal advertising strategies. The combination of normally incompatible elements leads to calculated, chance-based ruptures with unambiguity and calls for thinking simultaneously on different levels. Martens himself states: “I am proud that men’s magazines still don’t line up at my door, even though I offer quite a bit of the usual set pieces: breasts, bottoms, long legs, and so on. The media have an infallible instinct for recognizing where they are no longer being served—even through slight deviations or self-ironic reflections.”
In addition, there are artist portraits, including those of Dinos & Jake Chapman, Sarah Lucas, Franka Potente, the group Leningrad, and Roland Emmerich, in which Martens seeks to make visible what is specific to the portrayed artist—their working method or character. Entirely new, however, is his turn toward architectural photography. In contrast to the cool and objective aesthetic of his colleagues such as Thomas Ruff or Thomas Struth, who extract a general character from their subjects, Martens’ photographs evoke the uniqueness of each motif. Despite their fantastic appearance, the images are faithful depictions of the sometimes curious buildings that the artist tracks down through extensive research.
Martens lives and works in Leipzig."
- Birgit Laback -