Artist Catherine Opie made a name for herself with controversial LGBT portraits but her new work, infused with contemplative landscapes and indelible gatherings of Americans, has hardly lost her queer sensibility.
Ari Karpel writes in The Advocate of Opie’s current exhibit, “Empty and Full”:
She may no longer shoot in-your-face gay subjects, but by considering classic American landscapes Opie is creating a body of work that’s as much about finding identity as her portraits of lesbians and transgender folks were in the early 1990s.
“I’ve heard that before: Cathy Opie’s sold out, she just does pretty landscapes now,” Opie herself says. But not many years ago she did a series of large-scale Polaroids of controversial performance artist Ron Athey doing extreme body art. And, of course, when the Guggenheim Museum in New York presented a retrospective of her work in 2008, Opie had the museum selling hats emblazoned with the word dyke.
“I think that the more people can operate in the vastness of what they are truly interested in, if you can incorporate that, then you’re living a more interesting life and having the freedom to live a truth that’s much more interesting,” says the artist in her Los Angeles studio.
Read the full interview and see more of Opie’s incredible work on Advocate.com now.
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