Catherine Opie
Self-Portrait/Cutting, 1993
Today at QCA we’re revisiting the artist Catherine Opie. We feel that by allowing some artists multiple days we are able to both showcase different bodies of their work and give the viewers a more in-depth look at the artist’s overall themes. Today we will be looking at Catherine Opie’s self-portraits.
“1993’s “Self-Portrait/Cutting,”…plays with the history of painted portraiture while turning its back on it. Seated before a decorative green background like a royal icon by Holbein, she has a bleeding, childlike, stick-figure drawing of lesbian domestic bliss cut into the flesh of her back. (Artist Judie Bamber wielded the blade.) Art’s exalted tradition of the female nude floats into view.
Opie simultaneously accepts and rejects it. And she remakes it into a powerful document of humanist experience.”
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-opie9-2008dec09,0,6219144.story
