Catherine Opie’s Photographs at Wexner Center for the Arts

Final print files

Catherine Opie, 'Untitled #9,' pigment print, 40 in. x 60 in., 2013. | Collection of Tristin and Martin Mannion, Boston, MA ©Catherine Opie, image courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Final print files

Catherine Opie, 'Miranda,' pigment print, 33 in. x 25 in., 2013. | ©Catherine Opie, image courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Idexa_50x38_4

Catherine Opie, 'Idexa,' pigment print, 50 in. x 38.4 in., 2012. | © Catherine Opie, image courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Final print files

Catherine Opie, 'Untitled #1,' pigment print, 40 in. x 60 in., 2012. | ©Catherine Opie, image courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, presents new work by celebrated photographer and CalArts alumna Catherine Opie (Art MFA 88) in the exhibition Catherine Opie: Portraits and Landscapes.

The show, organized by curator Bill Horrigan, features approximately 50 new portraits and abstract landscape photographs by the Ohio-born artist. The portraits’ subjects are Opie’s “friends and people I admire” and includes visual artist and long-time CalArts faculty John Baldessari (Chouinard 59), filmmaker and writer Miranda July, Olympic swimmer Diana Nyad and novelist Jonathan Franzen.

From a press release:

The portraits, which employ classical compositions, theatrical lighting, and saturated color to render the faces and expressions of the subjects in intimate detail, hint at a tension between interior realities and external presentations.

In contrast to the personal quality of the portraits, the series’ abstracted landscape photographs articulate space as a haze of blurred light and color. A marked departure from the artist’s previous work in landscape photography—including her studies of American cities and of lake ice-houses, which strongly defined a sense of specific place—the new series denies any recognition of location.

Catherine Opie: Portraits and Landscapes is on view through Aug. 2. Above is a slideshow of selected works from the exhibition.