Genre/Gender/Portraiture

Catherine Opie

Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP)

São Paulo

Jul 5–Oct 27, 2024July 5–October 27, 2024

São Paulo

Catherine Opie (Sandusky, Ohio, 1961) is one of the main artists of international contemporary photography, and this is her first solo exhibition in Brazil. Since the late 1980s, Opie has worked with color and black-and-white photography, and portraiture is one of her prevalent genres—although she has also worked with architectural and landscape photography, among others. In fact, since college, she has been creating portraits of the queer community, of which she is a part. Thus, in a year dedicated to LGBTQIA+ narratives, characters, and themes at MASP, this exhibition brings together portraits of this population made by Opie over the decades.

Catherine Opie: Genre/Gender/Portraiture presents 66 photographs taken by Opie between 1987 and 2022. The subtitle of the exhibition alludes to the different meanings in Portuguese of the word gênero, which translates in English to both “gender” and “genre.” On the one hand, the genre is the type, the species, the form, the class, the category, the style; in the field of visual arts, we can talk about different genres in painting: portrait, landscape, still life. On the other hand, gender is the socially constructed difference between men and women or those who identify themselves in other ways, and can encompass different identities, whether transgender, non-binary, or cisgender. Opie appropriates the traditional portrait genre, normally associated with elites, to give visibility and strength to her own community.

Opie’s work has a rich dialogue with the history of portraiture in Western painting, and because of that, the exhibition includes 21 classic portraits from MASP’s European collection, spanning 400 years. The works are displayed on the iconic glass easels of Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992), the architect who designed the MASP building, proposing a compelling dialogue between many genres: painting and photography, the historical and the contemporary, and above all between bodies, sexualities, and gender identities.

Catherine Opie: Genre/Gender/Portraiture is curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, and Guilherme Giufrida, Assistant Curator.

Catherine Opie

Crystal Cross, 1989

Catherine Opie

Justin Bond, 1993

Catherine Opie

James, 1993

Catherine Opie

Raelyn Gallina, 1994

Catherine Opie

Skeeter, 1993

Catherine Opie

Anthony & Michael, 2012

Catherine Opie

Gina & April, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1998

Catherine Opie

Richard, 1993

Catherine Opie

Diana, 2012

Catherine Opie

Guillermo & Joaquin, 2013

Catherine Opie

Mirror #4 (The Modernist), 2016

Catherine Opie (b. 1961, Sandusky, OH; lives in Los Angeles, CA) is known for her powerfully dynamic photography that examines the ideals and norms surrounding the culturally constructed American dream and American identity. She first gained recognition in the 1990s for her series of studio portraits, photographing gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals drawn from her circle of friends and artists. Opie has traveled extensively across the country exploring the diversity of America’s communities and landscapes, documenting quintessential American subjects—high school football players and the 2008 presidential inauguration—while also continuing to display America’s subcultures through formal portraits. Using dramatic staging, Opie presents queer and trans bodies in intimate photographs that evoke traditional Renaissance portraiture—images of power and respect. In her portraits and landscapes, Opie establishes a level of ambiguity of both identity and place by exaggerating masculine or feminine characteristics, or by exaggerating distance, cropping, or blurring her landscapes.

Opie received a B.F.A. from San Francisco Art Institute in 1985, and an M.F.A. from CalArts in 1988. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at Museum of Art São Paulo (MASP), São Paulo, Brazil (2024); Heide Museum, Melbourne Australia (2023); The Current Now, Stowe, VT (2022); Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, Canada (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Cleveland, OH (2019); Marciano Foundation, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Princeton University School of Architecture, Princeton, NJ (2018); Centro Internazionale di Fotographia, Palermo, Italy (2018); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2015); Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA (2012); Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, NY (2012); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2011); Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR (2010); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2006); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2002); and the Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO (2000).

Learn about the artist