ESTABLISHED ARTIST: LA photographer, Catherine Opie
Catherine Opie (b. 1961, Sandusky, Ohio) is one of the preeminent artists of her generation working with photography.
She is known for her evocative images of contemporary America.
The artist has chosen a myriad of subjects throughout her career, including the S/M community, city buildings, domestic life, high school football players, surfers, and President Obama’s first inauguration.
Her pictures of the people, places, and events of the past 30 years are documents of the artist’s life as well as of our times.
She has been celebrated these last months of 2016 through out Three exhibitions in great institutions such as the MOCA, the LACMA, and the HAMMER
In 2010 the Getty shown her series of “mini-malls”, one of er best…
at the LACMA: Catherine Opie “O”
through September 5, 2016
In her many photographic projects, Catherine Opie has explored the tension between private desire and the public face. With the O Portfolio, shown at LACMA in its entirety for the first time in a Los Angeles museum, she offers an anatomy of sexual practices that are often obscured from public view. The photographs depict sadomasochistic scenarios derived from her participation in San Francisco’s bondage community.
At the MOCA Pacific Design Center
“700 Nimes road installation view” by Catherine Opie
through May 8th, 2016
Taken over the course of six months at the Bel-Air, California, residence of the late actress Elizabeth Taylor, the exhibition’s photographs are drawn from two series: Closets and Jewels, and 700 Nimes Road. Inspired by William Eggleston’s images of Elvis Presley’s Memphis estate, Graceland, Opie creates a portrait of Taylor from her personal space and mementos. The artist photographs rooms, closets, shoes, clothing, and jewelry that depict an indirect, yet deeply intimate, portrait of a life defined by wealth and fame. In the artist’s words, the project is not about the relationship to celebrity but about “the relationship to what is human.”
VIDEO BELOW:
At the Hammer “Portraits”
through May 8th, 2016
Exhibition organized by chief curator Connie Butler with Emily Gonzalez-Jarrett, curatorial associate.
12 portraits of visual artists, fashion designers, and writers, Opie’s most recent body of work engages directly with old master portraiture.
Opie’s work draws as much from Renaissance painting as from the traditions of street photography, and her most recent body of work most directly engages with old master portraiture. Drawn from her own circle of creative friends—visual artists, fashion designers, and writers—her sitters emerge from the darkness as if lit from within by their intellectual potency.
VIDEO below by the Hammer Projects
these portraits are a conversation to the early portraits that I did…..”
Urban Panoramas at the Getty
Feb-Jun, 2010
Watch the video here https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/urban_panoramas/#opie
