Catherine Opie: The Genre of Portraiture

Nearly four decades of work from the photographer who redefined the expression of gender in contemporary queer portraiture

A leading voice in contemporary photography, Catherine Opie has been known for her portraits of the queer scene in California since the late 1980s. A fundamental element of Opie’s work is the observation of different gender performances through a critical revision of the genre of portraiture. Her photography emphasizes how portraiture has the power to both reinforce and deconstruct conventional and binary expressions of gender. The title of this publication and the MASP exhibition it accompanies is based on the double meaning of the word gênero in Portuguese, meaning both ＂gender＂ and ＂genre.＂
For her first solo show in Brazil, Opie enters into dialogue with the tradition of the portrait--a way of representing the human figure that dates to the 15th century in the West--producing an archive of diverse presentations of gender and sexuality. Around 60 photographs from her most iconic series are displayed alongside a selection of around 15 emblematic portraits from MASP’s collection. Strongly marked by figuration and the formal constraint of portraiture, the juxtaposition of these works accentuates the dialogues, tensions and reformulations that Opie’s photographic oeuvre proposes.
Catherine Opie was born in Ohio in 1961 and is currently a professor of photography and the chair of the art department at UCLA. Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. She has had solo exhibitions of her work at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; St. Louis Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among many others.