Curated by Bill Horrigan

From leather dykes and surfer dudes to LA freeways and Minnesota icehouses, the photography of Catherine Opie has long engaged in a dialogue between the genres of portraiture and landscape. The Wexner offers a new lens through which to understand that discourse by focusing on two of Opie’s most recent bodies of work: a series of color portraits of friends, family members, and fellow artists and a collection of quasi-abstract landscape photographs. Opie pushes the lush color and formal stature of her portraits even further, sometimes presenting these works in oval formats recalling Northern Renaissance painting. In her latest landscapes, she racks the camera’s focus to create pictures in which nature (forests, waterfalls, mountains) is loosely recognizable yet never clearly resolved or easily inhabitable. This show promises to open another chapter in Opie’s ongoing—and thoroughly indispensable—photographic story.

— Richard Meyer