About Yair Aa

People are at the heart of Yair Aa’s work: figures turned inward, or moving towards one another. They live in a wondrous world where gravity cannot be taken for granted and perspective becomes a game. Acrobats and musicians, figures standing on their heads, human animals and animal humans: his images have the lightness of passing observations and, at the same time, the weight of a personal history in which the war and his Jewish background keep returning.

In form and choice of subject, his work has been associated with that of Paul Klee and Charlotte Salomon.

Yair Aa studied at the Hans Götz photography academy in Haarlem and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. The foundation of his photography was laid during a long journey to the Far East, where the photographs of 1986–1987 were made. He also made black-and-white photographs (1989–1991) and a series about the Cheider, a Jewish school in Amsterdam. Sixteen of those photographs are in the collection of the Joods Museum (Jewish Museum).

Having once been mainly a photographer, Yair Aa now works chiefly in watercolour, ink, pencil and oil paint. He has also made triptychs and drawings (1996–2006), etchings (2011–2012), paintings in acrylic on canvas and aluminium, portraits on slate, and sculptures.

Since 1999 his work has been shown in exhibitions in the Netherlands and abroad: from the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam and the international travelling exhibition Art Against Stigma (in Copenhagen and Tel Aviv, among other places) to Kunsthaus Kannen in Germany, the Outsider Art Gallery in the Hermitage Amsterdam and the Joods Museum, where his photographs were shown in ‘Every Picture Tells a Story’ in 2022.

Solo exhibitions include Galerie Linka (2001 and 2003), Beeldend Gesproken (‘Het andere verhaal’, 2014; ‘Let the light be us’, 2019) and De Hallen Amsterdam (‘Intieme tafereeltjes van een tovenaar’, 2021).

In 2021 he showed his Corona diary: 111 painted panels, together with oil portraits of loved ones, intimate watercolours, sculptures and the monumental triptych ‘De verschrikkingen van de oorlog’ (The horrors of war).

Work by Yair Aa is held in the collection of the Joods Museum in Amsterdam, which owns 179 watercolours, including an autobiographical series of 66, and sixteen photographs. Sanquin, Lundbeck (Denmark) and the Postcodeloterij (Dutch Postcode Lottery) have also acquired his work.

In 2008 he painted the set for ‘Alopsepla’, a visual theatre performance by Salomea Franken. In 2017 he drew the cover of the poetry collection for the Hebrew Translation Competition of the University of Amsterdam.

Work by Yair Aa is available for purchase and rental through Beeldend Gesproken in Amsterdam.