Meet David Hockney, Anish Kapoor and Jonathan Franzen's favourite photographer
Professor Catherine Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. Her masterful portriture and landscape photography studies the relationships between mainstream and infrequent society, with a large emphasis on sexual identity.
"Yesterday was the big day," says Catherine Opie, as we settle ourselves on a downbeat sofa in a modest photography studio just south of Waterloo Station. "We started with Lynette, then Isaac, then Duro. And ended with Celia."
The American artist, on a quick London trip, had been making portraits of fellow artists: the 2013 Turner Prize nominee Lynette Yiadom-Boakye; film-maker Isaac Julien; fashion designer Duro Olowu; and the ethereal portrait painter Celia Paul (who has a child by Lucian Freud). The results will soon be on show at Thomas Dane’s gallery in London.
These are just the latest additions to Opie’s ongoing series of celebrated creatives that she began five years ago with Laura and Kate Mulleavy,the fashion-designer sisters behind the Rodarte label. The writer Jonathan Franzen and the conceptual artist John Baldessari have been subject to what she calls her "extended stare". After I leave, designer Rick Owens will be passing by, and the day before both Anish Kapoor and Gillian Wearing had been in the chair.
"Her lighting brings an amazing painterly quality," says Wearing. "She captures people in an extraordinary way." Opie occupies a place in the top tier of fine art photographers, bringing the art-historical language of painters like Velázquez into the present day."— Caroline Roux, Sep. 30, 2017
Read the full article at the The Telegraph.
Read more about Professor Catherine Opie here.
Hear Opie speak on the arts here.
View some of Opie's work here.