CATHERINE OPIE: WALLS, WINDOWS AND BLOOD
Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce Walls, Windows and Blood, the recent body of work from acclaimed American photographer Catherine Opie.
February 8 – March 9, 2024
By examining the power systems and architectural structures that exist within the Vatican, the artist engages with both the legacy and present identity of this city within a city, raising critical questions about the history of the Roman Catholic Church and Catholicism and its impact today.
In Walls, Windows and Blood, Opie carefully examines the politics of place as it relates to identity, advancing ideas explored in many of her recent bodies of work including The Modernist (2017), Rhetorical Landscapes (2019), and 2020. While The Modernist dealt with themes of political breakdown and global upheaval, Rhetorical Landscapes pictured a portrait of America through the prism of the physical and political landscape, considering the violent language rife in U.S. political discourse as well as the impending ecological destruction resulting from climate change.
In 2020, Opie documented the lead up to the presidential election on a cross country road trip, with photographs taken against the backdrop of the global pandemic and widespread uprising against police brutality. In each of these series Opie seeks to map the complexities of our contemporary moment, especially with respect to the relationship between identity and structures of power, both physical and social.
Printed to stand 7 feet high, the artist's Vatican Walls are installed on hand-crafted Italian marble pedestals designed by American Academy Architecture Fellow Katy Barkan and positioned leaning against the walls of the gallery, giving them a sense of physical precarity. These large-scale works consider essential themes of inclusion versus exclusion, wall building, and borders, in addition to the more contemporary concern of modern surveillance, signaled by the security cameras that can be seen peeking over the ramparts.
In contrast with Walls are the artist’s photographs of windows, which alternately depict glimpses of the Vatican’s interior lawns and architecture and look out over the wider Roman capital, within which the Vatican occupies a unique position. The visibility from Opie’s Windows ranges from brilliantly clear to completely opaque, with frosted glass or pulled shades; in these works the artist contemplates the relationship between transparency and power, considering who controls the ability to see or be seen.
Interwoven throughout the Windows and Walls are the artist’s Blood Grids. To create these works, Opie first photographed every representation of blood depicted in the artwork in the Vatican Museum’s collection, subsequently framing specific selections at close range. The scenes of violence and conquest in the tapestries and paintings in the Vatican’s holdings are visual reminders of the power and dominance of the Catholic Church throughout history. Arranged aesthetically by Opie in a modernist grid, each image is isolated, erasing its narrative context and calling into question the ways in which these histories are told and experienced.