Catherine Opie

About the Exhibition

This exhibition of the work of Catherine Opie, an artist formerly based in Los Angeles but recently relocated to New York, presents several photographic series created during the past seven years in which the artist explores the structure of community from both a physical and social standpoint. Beginning with examples from her Portraits series of the mid 1990s-a sequence of elegant, frontal, color images of individuals who use their bodies as a site of sexual and aesthetic experimentation, including several self-portraits-the exhibition will also include works from subsequent series-Houses and Landscapes, Freeways, and Mini-malls-in which Opie documents aspects of the social life and infrastructure of the urban landscape of Los Angeles. Her most recent series, Domestic, marks her return to color portraiture; in these images of lesbian families and couples in their home interiors Opie continues to question what constitutes the ideal home and the ideal family.

This exhibition, the most comprehensive presentation of Opie’s work to date, is organized by the Photographers’ Gallery in London.

Support for the Chicago presentation has been provided by Curt Alan Conklin, with additional support from C. Bradford Smith and Donald L. Davis