CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/27/2025

Four decades of Catherine Opie's powerful portraiture

Genre / Gender / Portraiture, Catherine Opie’s 2024 retrospective at MASP, São Paolo, was an international sensation, assembling four decades of the California artist’s groundbreaking queer portraiture alongside a selection of historical artworks from MASP’s collection. The catalog has finally reached our shores, beautifully designed with tipped on cover image, stamping, various papers and several gatefolds. “I don’t believe that a portrait is essentially about the person,” Opie is quoted. “I think that the only expectation I have about portraiture is to recognize what a shared moment can do. It’s still, for me, an internal space that becomes external. And that’s where it gets tricky for me. I want to offer you an entry place of looking at this person, but I believe that we have ways of being that are different and that change. Singular identity is something that I’ve never really understood in relationship to representation.” Pictured here, “Oliver in a Tutu,” from the series In and Around Home (2004).