-The Gay & Lesbian Review
Amid the anti-LGBT culture wars of the 1990s, photographer Catherine Opie came to national prominence with a series of images depicting leather dykes and self-portraits featuring cutting and piercing, putting her in the pantheon of late 20th-century queer art photographers who extend from Robert Mapplethorpe’s erotic deviance to Nan Goldin’s diaristic slideshows. Opie’s iconography defied the prevailing censorship of provocative—and especially queer—art led by Senator Jesse Helms and his ilk, but it also challenged anti-porn stalwarts and queer assimilationists.
Since then, she has focused her lenses on numerous subcultures, urban architecture, political rallies, and landscapes, even shooting Elizabeth Taylor’s personal effects. Her creations are collected and shown worldwide. Despite her often flamboyant content, Opie calls herself a “formalist” inspired by the Renaissance portraiture of 16th-century German-Swiss painter Hans Holbein.
In 2024, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateau-briand presented Opie’s first solo exhibition in Brazil, titled Genre/Gender/Portraiture, as part of a year devoted to queer histories, including the work of Francis Bacon and the AIDS activist collective Gran Fury. The exhibition catalog, edited by curators Adriano Pedrosa and Guilherme Giufrida, explores Opie’s painterly influences by juxtaposing 66 of her photographs (taken between 1987 and 2022) with 21 oil portraits by Holbein, Gauguin, van Gogh, Rembrandt, and other great painters from the museum’s collection. This curatorial conceit highlighted the opulence of Opie’s composition as well as her cornucopia of unsanctioned queer desire.
The exhibition featured color-saturated prints of actor Elliot Page, singer Justin Vivian Bond, swimmer Diana Nyad, and performance artist Ron Athey, along with less formal black-and-whites from Opie’s Girlfriends series. Nyad’s muscular, sun-burnished nude backside was exhibited alongside a Renoir and Bond’s demure headshot paired with a Modigliani. Leather “gendernauts” and drag kings were amply represented in images replete with tattoos, piercings, fake mustaches, costumes, and fetish gear. These were intermingled with photos of settled lesbian couples at home. Aristocratic renderings by van Dyck, Rubens, Velázquez, and Manet accompanied them.
The exhibition included Opie’s provocative early self-portraits such as Self-Portrait/Cutting(1993), which focuses on a crude drawing of two female stick figures in front of a house carved into Opie’s back, with the contours still bleeding. Opie wears a black hood in Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994), with needles in her arms and the word “Pervert” carved in oozing letters across her bare chest, an image that was presented alongside Goya’s Portrait of Ferdinand VII. The harshness of these photos was counterbalanced by the sweetness of Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004), which shows Opie gazing lovingly at her son as she breastfeeds. This was ingeniously shown with Bellini’s The Virgin with Standing Child.
The catalog beautifully reproduces her resplendent photographs and their complementary paintings. Insightful essays discuss Opie’s performative staging of issues related to gender, taboo, and the construction of identity, all within the context of familial intimacy. While this body of work represents only a portion of the artist’s œuvre, the exhibition and the catalog affirm her essential contribution to queer representation.