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
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
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.
The Instamatic, 700 Nimes Road and The Modernist
Opie was given a Kodak Instamatic for her ninth birthday and had built her own darkroom by fourteen. Dyke, of 1993, a portrait of a friend with the word tattooed on her neck, was the first time she photographed a sitter against a fabric backdrop, and Self-Portrait/Nursing, of 2004, shows her with her son in the pose of the Madonna and Child.
In 2011 she photographed Elizabeth Taylor's house in Bel Air, taking some 3,000 pictures, of which 129 were published in 2015 as 700 Nimes Road. Her first film, The Modernist, of 2017, is made from 800 still images in homage to Chris Marker's La Jetée. She has served on the boards of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Andy Warhol Foundation, and received the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
