-The Arts Fuse
During the Culture Wars of the ’90s, photographer Catherine Opie came to national prominence with her images of leather dykes along with self-portraits that featured cutting and piercing. She quickly joined an iconic pantheon that included Robert Mapplethorpe’s pictures of erotic deviance and Nan Goldin’s diaristic slideshows. Her art became collected and shown world-wide.
In 2024, Opie had her first solo exhibition in Brazil at the Museu De Arte De São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand. Sixty-six of her photographs (taken between 1987 and 2022) were placed in lively dialogue with twenty-one classical oil portraits from the museum’s collection. This sly curatorial conceit not only highlighted how Opie’s opulent compositions fit into art history — it underscored the varied ways she celebrates unsanctioned queer desire.
Catherine Opie: Genre/Gender/Portraiture (KMEC Books, 176 pages, $45) documents the Brazilian show, pairing her resplendent photos with the complementary paintings. Insightful essays discuss Opie’s indispensable contribution to queer representation, examining her performative staging of such topics as gender, taboo, and the social construction of identity.
Also included are color saturated prints of actor Elliot Page, singer Justin Bond, swimmer Diana Nyad, and performance artist Ron Athey, along with less formal black and whites from Opie’s Girlfriends series. Leather gendernauts are amply represented, pictured with tattoos, piercings, fake mustaches, costumes, and fetish gear, along with pictures of settled lesbian couples at home.
Opie’s provocative self-portraits from her early years are also included. In Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993), the focus is on a crude drawing carved into her back of two female stick-figures — the etching’s contours are still bleeding. Opie wears a black hood in Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994) — there are needles in her arms, the word “Pervert” carved in oozing letters across her bare chest. Goya’s Portrait of Fernando VII is paired alongside this picture.
The harshness of some of these photos is counterbalanced by the sweetness of such images as Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004). Here. Opie gazes lovingly at her son as she breastfeeds him. This image is ingeniously matched with Bellini’s The Virgin with Standing Child.