Lisa Oppenheim: Monsieur Steichen

American artist Lisa Oppenheim (1975, New York) has been invited to create a new body of work in response to the artistic practice of Edward Steichen (1879, Bivange, Luxembourg – 1973, Redding, Connecticut). Oppenheim’s exhibition explores peripheral and often lesser-known aspects of the work of the Luxembourg-born American photographer and exhibition curator: his paintings, which he abandoned and largely destroyed in the 1920s; his lifelong passion for flowers, particularly Delphiniums, of which he created several varieties and his textile designs from the 1920s, based on photographs of everyday objects. ‘Steichen’s wide-ranging practice is hard to imagine in our age of hyper-specialisation,’ Oppenheim observes. ‘In this exhibition, I would like to inhabit the practice of Steichen rather than examine any particular project. I plan to do with the work of Steichen what he did throughout his own long life: inhabit his tendency to ingest and reconstitute a wide range of practices and ideas and in that way hopefully expand an understanding of what it is to be a cultural producer.’

The exhibition also includes several photographs by Steichen from the collection of the MNAHA in Luxembourg, highlighting the role women played in his life and work, and the way he incorporated their presence and gestures into his photographs. Presented in the same installation, the works of Oppenheim and Steichen depict an abstract, subjective and kaleidoscopic portrait of ‘Monsieur Steichen’.

Biography

Lisa Oppenheim (1975, New York) has had solo exhibitions at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2024); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2018); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2017); Frac Champagne-Ardenne, Reims (2015); the Kunstverein in Hamburg (2014) and the Grazer Kunstverein (2014). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Getty Center, Los Angeles (2024 and 2015); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2021); the Jewish Museum, New York (2021); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013). Her work is included in the collections of institutions such as the Getty Center, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Lisa Oppenheim lives and works in New York.