CATHERINE OPIE & ANNA PARK: IN DIALOGUE

Lehmann Maupin presents In Dialogue: Catherine Opie & Anna Park, on view October 17 through November 9 in New York. 

October 18 – November 9, 2024

In Dialogue: Catherine Opie & Anna Park considers two significant approaches to contemporary portraiture, through photography and charcoal and ink on paper, respectively. Throughout art history, portraits have been used to memorialize, admire, and convey individual narratives; the genre is by nature intimate and mandates a humanistic encounter with the subject matter. Formally, portraiture is often harnessed to mark moments of transition in a subject’s life. This iteration of In Dialogue looks at Opie and Park’s approach to the portrayal of others, and themselves, through a visual language that is distinctly their own. 

Opie is known for her powerfully dynamic photography that examines the ideals and norms surrounding the culturally constructed American dream and American identity. Opie’s subjects give a strong voice to those historically less centered in portrait photography, providing representation to her friends and the community at large. Using dramatic staging, Opie presents queer and trans bodies in intimate photographs, which compositionally are images of immense power and respect. While Opie’s portraits foreground her community and friends, Anna Park’s depiction of the figure in her work serves as a vehicle for understanding her own experience of the American dream and American culture. 

Park's large-scale, satirical self-portraits comment on the cultural construction and perception of identity, sexuality, and power in an increasingly media saturated world. In black-and-white works that hover between figuration and abstraction, Park’s compositions recall the vigorous energy of the graphic novel and the radical fragmentation of Cubism or even Pop Art; moments collapse into speed streaks, limbs grasp for one another, and glimpses of familiar faces emerge. 

In this exhibition, Opie and Park prompt us to question the nature of subjectivity in portraiture by challenging societal norms and expectations around gender and sexuality. In Dialogue: Catherine Opie & Anna Park harnesses the power of portraiture to exceed traditional notions of the genre.