Catherine Opie valuation
Portraits of queer Los Angeles with the formality of Holbein, and freeways printed in platinum.
Catherine Opie was born at Sandusky in Ohio in 1961, studied at San Diego State and at CalArts, and has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles since 2001.
What a work by Catherine Opie is worth
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Bio
Catherine Opie was born at Sandusky in Ohio in 1961, studied at San Diego State and at CalArts, and has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles since 2001. The portraits of the early 1990s — friends from the lesbian, gay and leather communities of Los Angeles, photographed in saturated colour against brilliant backdrops with the formality of Holbein — made her name, as did the self-portraits that accompanied them, among them Self-Portrait/Cutting and Self-Portrait/Pervert. The same attention went to places: Freeways, small panoramic platinum prints of empty Los Angeles interchanges; mini-malls; Minnesota ice-fishing houses; surfers waiting for waves; high school football. The Guggenheim in New York gave her a survey, American Photographer, in 2008.
Process and series identify the work. The portraits are chromogenic prints made in small editions; the Freeways are platinum prints, small, delicate and tonally unlike anything else she has made; and much of the later work is printed as pigment prints, often at more than one size. Edition number, size and date of printing need establishing together. Large colour prints are sensitive to light and to handling, and platinum prints depend on the condition of their paper and mount. Signature, title, date and edition are normally on the verso or a label, and her galleries hold the edition records.
CalArts, Being and Having and Domestic
Opie took her MFA at CalArts in 1988 with Master Plan, a thesis project on the development of California suburbs. She moved to Los Angeles in 1989 and supported herself as a laboratory technician at the University of California, Irvine. Being and Having, of 1991, thirteen colour portraits of lesbian friends, came first, followed by the Portraits of 1993 to 1997.
Domestic, of 1995 to 1998, recorded lesbian families on a two-month road trip in a motorhome, and American Cities, of 1997 to 2006, is a series of black and white panoramas. She received a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006, became UCLA's first endowed chair in art in 2019 and is now professor emeritus, and with Richard Hawkins curated work by Tony Greene for the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
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