Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road presents new and recent work by Los Angeles-based artist Catherine Opie, an essential figure in contemporary photography.  The exhibition will be on view at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale from February 12 – June 18, 2017.

Taken over the course of six months at the Bel-Air, California residence of the late actress Elizabeth Taylor, the exhibition’s photographs are drawn from two series: Closets and Jewels, and 700 Nimes Road. Inspired by William Eggleston’s images of Elvis Presley’s Memphis estate, Graceland, Opie creates a portrait of Taylor from her personal space and mementos.

The artist photographs rooms, closets, shoes, clothing and jewelry that depict an indirect, yet deeply intimate portrait of a life defined by wealth and fame.  With an investigative eye, Opie documents the grandeur and minute details of a home in a range of visual scales.  Scrutiny tempered with restraint allows objects to accumulate, rooms to become landscapes, and clothing to be transformed into fields of color and texture.  Opie’s lens portrays Taylor’s life experience and eccentricity as an illusory subject, one that cannot be specifically designated or precisely described. In the artist’s words, the project is not about the relationship to celebrity, but about “the relationship to what is human.”

About Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie was born in Sandusky, Ohio and received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia in 1988. Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 2008, a mid-career survey of her work was presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.  Recent solo exhibitions of Opie’s work have been organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Aldrich Museum in Connecticut; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; The Saint Louis Art Museum; the Photographers’ Gallery in London; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Long Beach Museum of Art in California.  Opie was a recipient of the Julius Shulman Excellence in Photography award in 2013 and a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006.  Her book 700 Nimes Road, a portrait of Elizabeth Taylor, was published by Prestel. Opie lives and works in Los Angeles and is a Professor of Photography at UCLA.

The exhibition is organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Major support for the exhibition is provided by J.P. Morgan Private Bank. Generous support for the exhibition is provided by Jamie McCourt, and Gilena Simons.

Support for the exhibition at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale is provided by Funding Arts Broward, Northern Trust, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and Venice Magazine.