CATHERINE OPIE – harmony is fraught
Video (10:14): ‘CATHERINE OPIE WALKTHROUGH AT REGEN PROJECTS LOS ANGELES’. Video by ERIC MINH SWENSON ART FILMS, 2024.
CATHERINE OPIE – harmony is fraught
at Regen Projects, Los Angeles, USA
January 11 – March 3, 2024
Regen Projects write, ‘Catherine Opie’s eleventh exhibition with Regen Projects, harmony is fraught presents over sixty photographs never shown publicly before, drawn from over thirty years of making pictures in and of Los Angeles. We see a deeply singular diary of Opie’s world—especially her early years as an emerging artist in the 1990s—intertwined with the complex public life of the city she made her home, from its signature freeways and landmarks, like the Hollywood sign, to scenes of activism and surfers at the beach. Together, they collectively trace a profoundly personal story, as well as the evolving drama and common grandeur of Los Angeles itself, a singular assembly of constructions, conflicts, and communities.’
Catherine Opie
‘Catherine Opie (b. 1961 Sandusky, Ohio) received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She is Professor Emerita and former Lynda and Stewart Resnick Endowed Chair in Art at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was a professor of photography from 2001 to 2023. For over thirty years, Catherine Opie has captured both iconic and often overlooked aspects of contemporary American life and culture. One of the most important photographers of her generation, her photographic subjects have included early portraits of the LGBTQ+ community, the architecture of Los Angeles’s freeway system, mansions in Beverly Hills, Midwestern icehouses, high school football players, California surfers, abstract landscapes of National Parks, and the Bel-Air residence of Elizabeth Taylor, among others. In 2018 Opie debuted her first film, The Modernist, a dystopic view of Los Angeles, a city that has figured prominently in her work over the years. Her complex and diverse body of work is political, personal, and highly aesthetic, keeping questions of form, concept, and the documentary in constant dynamic interplay.’ [- excerpt from the exhibition press release]
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