Catherine Opie (Sandusky, Ohio, 1961) is one of the main artists of international contemporary photography, and this is her first solo exhibition in Brazil. Since the late 1980s, Opie has worked with color and black-and-white photography, and portraiture is one of her prevalent genres—although she has also worked with architectural and landscape photography, among others. In fact, since college, she has been creating portraits of the queer community, of which she is a part. Thus, in a year dedicated to LGBTQIA+ narratives, characters, and themes at MASP, this exhibition brings together portraits of this population made by Opie over the decades.
Catherine Opie: Genre/Gender/Portraiture presents 66 photographs taken by Opie between 1987 and 2022. The subtitle of the exhibition alludes to the different meanings in Portuguese of the word gênero, which translates in English to both “gender” and “genre.” On the one hand, the genre is the type, the species, the form, the class, the category, the style; in the field of visual arts, we can talk about different genres in painting: portrait, landscape, still life. On the other hand, gender is the socially constructed difference between men and women or those who identify themselves in other ways, and can encompass different identities, whether transgender, non-binary, or cisgender. Opie appropriates the traditional portrait genre, normally associated with elites, to give visibility and strength to her own community.
Opie’s work has a rich dialogue with the history of portraiture in Western painting, and because of that, the exhibition includes 21 classic portraits from MASP’s European collection, spanning 400 years. The works are displayed on the iconic glass easels of Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992), the architect who designed the MASP building, proposing a compelling dialogue between many genres: painting and photography, the historical and the contemporary, and above all between bodies, sexualities, and gender identities.
Catherine Opie: Genre/Gender/Portraiture is curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, and Guilherme Giufrida, Assistant Curator.
