Catherine Opie: To What We Think We Remember

Over a career now spanning more than three decades, Opie’s practice has encompassed social documentary of subcultures and marginalised groups, elegant portraiture of her peers and fellow artistic luminaries, abstraction, and the self-titled genre of ‘political landscape’ photography. After rising to prominence in the 1990s and establishing herself as a pioneer of queer representation – through studio portraits of close friends in the leather and LGBTQ+ communities, large format environmental portraits of lesbian domestic life, and her mesmerising and now iconic self-portraits – Opie has continued to focus her lens on wider but no less hard-hitting themes within broader geopolitical, cultural, and historical narratives.

The works in To What We Think We Remember act as a metaphorical framework for reflection: on the artist’s personal life, relationships, and work, but also on the fragility of humanity, the fractured ideals of a collective responsibility, and how to move forward while faced with the potentially devastating challenges of climate change, and the erasure of personal and political freedoms.

Opie’s reflection on the archive – prompted by the publication in 2021 of her Phaidon monograph – lends itself to an expanded approach to exhibition making and a break from serialism. The images in this poetic group forge deeper conversations between notions of freedom and confinement, as well as between abstraction and the limits of representation. 

The carefree Fjord Flip (2014) suggests the joy of youthful exuberance, but also the ‘suspended’ state of existence since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, while Herman, Norway (2014) and Edvard Munch’s summer home, Asgardstrand, Norway (2014) continue Opie’s conversation with the language of painting and reflection on the artist’s place in – and view of – the world.

Catherine Opie (b. 1961 Sandusky, Ohio) received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985, and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, in 1988. In 2000, she was appointed Professor of Fine Art at Yale University, and in 2001 she accepted the position of Professor of Photography at the University of California, Los Angeles, which she currently holds. 

Opie's photographs include series of portraits and American urban landscapes, ranging in format from large-scale colour works to smaller black and white prints. Moving from the territory of the body to the geography of the city, Opie's various photographic series are linked together by a conceptual framework of cultural portraiture. Her work has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. In 2017, a survey exhibition entitled Catherine Opie: Keeping an Eye on the World was on view at the Henie Onstad Art Center in Oslo, Norway. Recent solo exhibitions have been organized by MOCA Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus. In October 2016 she completed a monumental installation for the new Los Angeles Federal Courthouse.