AMSTERDAM.- Galerie Ron Mandos is presenting Tender Fury, which brings together Erwin Olaf and Kendell Geers, two iconic artists whose practices have each forged a distinctive visual language at the intersection of healing, intimacy and rage. Rooted in deeply personal histories of activism against racism, prejudice, and discrimination, the exhibition reveals connections between their lives and work, despite differences in medium and tone. Tender Fury is on view from January 24 through April 5, 2026.

Curated through the personal perspective of their close friend and gallerist Ron Mandos, Tender Fury offers a fragile yet powerful portrait of two artists who struggled to find their voices within art systems they felt alienated from. In response, both created bodies of work that expose the political power of images. Tenderness and fury are not contradictions here, but coexisting forces: each artist believes in art as a language capable of disabling systems of oppression, control, repression and censorship.

Kendell Geers’s practice is grounded in sharp intellectual rigor and is often compared to that of Marcel Duchamp in its shift away from the individual art object toward a more holistic approach—one that connects every detail of the art system. His work is also decisively shaped by his experience as an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa. Formed within a society structured by legal brutality, censorship, and ideological symbolism, he developed an acute sensitivity to how authority embeds itself as blind habit in everyday forms.

This sensitivity is clearly articulated in his Les Fleurs du Mal paintings, in which the seemingly benign genre of the still life becomes a vehicle for confrontation. Historically associated with beauty, fragility, and contemplation, the flower is transformed by Geers into a charged political and existential subject. Rather than offering aesthetic consolation, these works infuse beauty with threat: blossoms appear seductive yet aggressive, collapsing the still life’s promise of timelessness into a sense of urgency. Violence, colonial history, mortality, and desire emerge through this polished surface, demonstrating how even the most decorative cultural forms are never ideologically neutral. In this way, the paintings exemplify Geers’s broader strategy of exposing how power disguises itself as taste, tradition, or habit, while implicating the viewer in the act of passive acceptance.

Erwin Olaf, by contrast, works through meticulously staged photographic tableaux that draw viewers inward rather than confronting them head-on. His cinematic images explore vulnerability, repression, and emotional isolation. Olaf’s figures exist in suspended moments of silence and tension, revealing how power, gender norms, and social expectations are internalized and performed within private spaces.

Despite their differing approaches, both artists treat the image as a site of resistance. Where Geers externalizes conflict through overt symbols of threat and exclusion, Olaf internalizes it, exposing how authority is absorbed and normalized. Together, their works trace a continuum between public violence and private consequence, ideological systems and personal experience.

Both artists destabilize comfort. Geers employs black humor, linguistic disruption, and aesthetic dissonance. Olaf works through intimacy, empathy and psychological unease. In each case, the viewer is implicated, not as a neutral observer so much as an active participant in systems of looking, judging and habits of acceptance.

This dialogue underscores a shared commitment to art as a critical tool that is urgent rather than decorative, unnerving rather than reassuring. Geers reveals the image as a battleground, where desire itself becomes an act of defiance against moral, religious and nationalist constraint. His new works for Tender Fury draw on the aesthetics of the redacted Epstein files, which he compares to Malevich, Theo van Doesburg, and Piet Mondrian. For Geers, “the aesthetics of redaction are the visible expression of unchecked political power in deciding what may be seen, what is censored and what must be imagined.”

Olaf’s photography offers a counterpoint grounded in tenderness and psychological depth. His images depict bodies poised between longing and restraint, intimacy and isolation. Quiet yet deeply political, Olaf’s eroticism resists dominant narratives of masculinity and power through vulnerability, queerness, and emotional exposure. In his practice, activism unfolds through empathy and recognition rather than confrontation.

Tender Fury is timely exhibition that addresses the Post Traumatic Stress of a global society ripped apart by extremism and conflict. Both artists believe in the power of art to give the viewer keys to healing from trauma and to protest their own tender fury. Geers ignites fury as a destabilizing force that fractures taboos and exposes violence embedded in cultural habits, whilst Olaf cultivates tenderness as an insistence on intimacy, and emotional truth as political acts. Positioning eroticism not as spectacle but as strategy, the exhibition asserts that pleasure, vulnerability, and the right to desire freely remain inseparable from struggles for justice and freedom

Dance and Nude

In the red room at the back of the gallery, Erwin Olaf’s enduring engagement with Nude unfolds as an act of trust, dignity, and emancipation. Spanning his career from early black-and-white photography of the 1980s to later studio works, the selection reveals how nudity was never a provocation for Olaf, but a means of looking—carefully and attentively—at the human body. Fascinated by skin and its capacity to carry vulnerability and pride, he resisted both censorship and cliché, insisting on the body as a site of beauty in all its forms. It did not matter to Olaf what his subjects looked like or who they were: fat or thin, young or old, white or black, straight or gay, each was placed on a pedestal, emerging from the encounter not exposed, but affirmed.

This love for the human body finds a natural counterpart in Dance, where skin and movement converge in an exploration of control, effort, and precision. Olaf’s engagement with dance began with Hans van Manen, his close friend and mentor, who introduced him to fine art photography and taught him to look at the body with absolute clarity and intention. Van Manen, who sadly passed away in December 2025, remained a lifelong point of reference for Olaf, both artistically and personally. From these beginnings to later commissions by the Dutch National Ballet and highly refined close-ups, Olaf’s dance photographs treat the body as sculpture in motion, every muscle and gesture deliberately composed. Dance taught him how to direct the body down to its smallest detail, sharpening his photographic craft and deepening his understanding of physical expression.

In this last room, Nude and Dance are inseparable: both arise from Olaf’s devotion to the body as a vessel of beauty, discipline, and presence, where stillness and movement alike reveal the intensity of being human.

Kendell Geers (SA, 1968) is a pivotal figure in contemporary art, globally renowned for a practice that confronts identity, resistance, and the enduring legacies of history. Rooted in early political activism, his work asserts art as an ethical and transformative force that actively intervenes in social and historical realities. Working within a post-Duchampian lineage, Geers conceives art as a field of relations rather than objects, integrating making, writing, and curating into a unified practice. His exhibitions function as Gesamtkunstwerk with immersive propositions in which artworks, texts, and space operate as a single work. Through this expanded approach, Geers advances a holistic vision of art in which aesthetics, politics, spirituality and knowledge are inseparable, positioning art as a living process that reshapes perception and consciousness.

Kendell Geers has been presented in major international exhibitions including the Venice Biennial, Documenta, the Carnegie International and Manifesta. In 2025, Geers curated “Everything is True: Nothing is Permitted” a groundbreaking exhibition that positioned art as a political force at Brutus, Rotterdam. “Blind Faith – Rituals for Uncertain Times” is currently on view at the Abby Museum in Kortrijk. The exhibition compares the Medieval depictions of the Apocalypse with contemporary art. In 2024, he published “Duchamp’s Endgame: Da Vinci, Dürer, Ingres, Poussin” a critical book-length project exploring the open source structure of art history and Duchamp was actually looking closely at the work of other artists, who in turn was profoundly influenced by yet another artists , who were also looking at other artists all the way back through time.

Erwin Olaf (NL, 1959–2023) was internationally acclaimed for a diverse and influential practice encompassing photography, film, and installation, centering on society’s marginalized individuals, including people of color and the LGBTQ+ community. Beginning in the 1980s by documenting pre-AIDS gay liberation in Amsterdam’s nightlife, Olaf sustained an explicitly activist engagement with equality throughout his forty-year career. His work consistently addressed power, vulnerability, race, economic disparity, and the politics of sexuality through meticulously staged, cinematic tableaux. In 2019, Olaf was appointed Knight of the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands following the acquisition of more than 500 works by the Rijksmuseum, whose director Taco Dibbits described him as “one of the most important photographers of the final quarter of the 20th century.”

Erwin Olaf served as official portrait artist to the Dutch royal family in 2017 and designed the national side of the euro coins in 2013. He received major honors including the Johannes Vermeer Award and, in 2023, the Medal of Honor for Art and Science of the Order of the House of Orange. His work has been exhibited internationally, with recent major presentations including exhibitions at Kunstmuseum The Hague and The Hague Museum of Photography (2019), the Shanghai Center of Photography (2019), a large survey at Kunsthalle München (2021), PHotoESPAÑA in Madrid (2024), and the ongoing retrospective Freedom at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, on view through March 2026.

Born into a working class Afrikaans family during the height of Apartheid, Kendell Geers quickly found himself fighting a Crime Against Humanity on the front lines of activism and protest. Running away from the military regime and a six year prison sentence, he escaped to London in 1988 as a political refugee. In 1989 he moved on to New York where he found employ as Richard Prince’s full time assistant. Following the release of Nelson Mandela, Geers returned to South Africa in 1990 to help build the new democracy.

From his strong experiences as a revolutionary, he developed a psycho-social-political practice that held ethics and aesthetics to be opposite sides of the very same coin, spinning upon the tables of history. In his hands, the discourse of art history is interrogated, languages of power and ideological codes subverted, expectations smashed and belief systems transformed into aesthetic codes. The raw energy of a Punk attitude is blended with the visceral visionary philosophy of poets like Rimbaud, Blake and Burroughs in an uncanny cocktail of unexpected contrasts.

A European by descent, an African by birth, Kendell Geers work embodies the contradictions of his identity, being both Animist and Mystic, Shaman and Alchemist, Punk and Poet. The warp of popular culture is woven into the weft of poetry, painting, literature and ritual. He uses experience to colour perception, spiritualising matter and materialising spirit, mocking tradition like an iconoclast whilst celebrating history like a Medieval Monk.

Believing that art is as political as it is spiritual, Kendell Geers’ varied practice cannot be simplified, cannot be reduced to cliché or fashion. Working as an artist, musician, designer and writer, his strategies are without compromise because he believes that “Art changes the world – one perception at a time.”

Kendell Geers was born in May 1968, Johannesburg, South Africa

He lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Erwin Olaf (1959-2023) was known for his diverse practice that centered around society’s marginalized individuals, including people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community. In 2019, Olaf became a Knight of the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands after 500 works from his oeuvre were added to the collection of the Rijksmuseum. Taco Dibbits, Rijksmuseum director, called Olaf “one of the most important photographers of the final quarter of the 20th century”.

In 2018, Olaf completed a triptych of monumental photographic and filmic tableaux portraying periods of seismic change in major world cities, and the citizens embraced and othered by their urban progress. Like much of his work, it is contextualized by complex race relations, the devastation of economic divisions, and the complications of sexuality. Olaf maintained an activistic approach to equality throughout his 40-year career after starting out documenting pre-AIDS gay liberation in Amsterdam’s nightlife in the 1980s.

A bold and sometimes controversial approach earned the artist a number of prestigious collaborations, from Vogue and Louis Vuitton, to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. He served as the official portrait artist for the Dutch royal family in 2017, and designed the national side of the euro coins for King Willem-Alexander in 2013. He was awarded the Netherlands’ prestigious Johannes Vermeer Award, as well as Photographer of the Year at the International Color Awards, and Kunstbeeld magazine’s Dutch Artist of the Year. In 2023, His Majesty the King Willem-Alexander awarded him the Medal of Honor for Art and Science of the Order of the House of Orange.

Erwin Olaf exhibited worldwide, including Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Málaga, Spain; Museu da Imagem e do Som, São Paulo, Brazil; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile. In the spring of 2019, Olaf’s work was the subject of a double exhibition at Kunstmuseum The Hague and The Hague Museum of Photography, as well as a solo exhibition at the Shanghai Center of Photography. In 2021, Erwin Olaf had his first solo exhibition Im Wald at Galerie Ron Mandos and mounted a large survey exhibition at Kunsthalle München, Germany.

Olaf’s work is included in numerous private and public collections, such as the Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk Museum, both in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, The Netherlands; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, United States; Art Progressive Collection, United States; and the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia.