(L.A. in São Paulo)
Catherine Opie
at Museu de Arte de São Paulo

Catherine Opie, Genre/Gender/Portraiture (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Photo: Eduardo Ortega.

For over four decades, L.A.- based artist Catherine Opie has sought to reframe art history with a queer lens. Her practice pays close attention to gender identity and uses art historical touchpoints to shear elitist forms of categorization. Genre/Gender/Portraiture, Opie’s first solo show in Brazil at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) gestured to these concerns, placing 66 of her photographs of queer subjects from 1987 to 2022 in dialogue with 21 classic European portrait paintings from the museum’s collection. The MASP paintings ranged from the fifteenth to early-twentieth century and, paired with photographs by Opie, offered a direct connection between the artist’s oeuvre and the art history it cheekily cribs.

The spacious, free span, and unwalled exhibition room was filled with works presented within the iconic crystal exhibition easels designed for MASP by Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, who also designed the museum’s building. Each of the historical works and Opie’s framed photographs were installed on their own glass panel, anchored by a concrete base, providing the highly unique experience of being able to see the entire show at a glance, the works layering over each other in space across the gallery. Besides the direct connections made by pairing works across the show, the transparency of the crystal easels encouraged interplanar and macrocosmic dialogues through the visual penetrability of the exhibition mounting. This also built a well-materialized argument for hierarchical and compartmental disobedience, one that curators Guilherme Giufrida and Adriano Pedrosa were keen to encourage. Beyond reframing social constructions through Opie’s subject matter, the exhibition disobeyed museum conventions, reinforcing Opie’s mission of disrupting art historical canons.

Genre/Gender/Portraiture deeply intertwined Judith Butler’s notion of “performativity”—a concept that was unraveled by Giufrida in the exhibition catalog¹—through which gender agency is based on a symbolic structure of socially imposed signs.² This notion finds resonance with Roland Barthes’ idea of “posing,” the notion that when the photographed subject is aware of the image-making, they instantaneously and unwittingly pose.³ What’s interesting to Barthes is not the physical or formal pose itself, but the self-establishment of an external image of oneself within this context. This projected image is a performative one, Butler would argue, since one’s presentation to society is always a produced act, either in obedience or disobedience of social norms. Opie’s portraits emphasize that every external image runs through a performative circuit, not only when the photographed subject actively poses (as in most of the works in the show, such as the rare candid photo Oliver in a Tutu, 2004), but because the presentation of oneself in society is inevitably affected by normative societal standards, even when we act in resistance to them.

Giovanni Bellini’s The Virgin with the Standing Child Embracing His Mother (Madonna Willys) (1480–90), for example, depicts a consecrated, performative maternal image linked to purity and holiness. In the exhibition, the painting is paired with Opie’s Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004), in which the artist is seen nursing her child, the duo elucidating Opie’s discordance with this historically conventional pose of motherhood. In Opie’s portrait, the scarlet backdrop with golden ornamental motifs—elements echoed by the tattoos on the artist’s shoulder and arm— reflects the official, bourgeois atmosphere coined by Western portrait painting tradition. The gilded ornamentation common in early Renaissance paintings reappears in the scarification lines on Opie’s chest which—although faded after ten years of cicatrization—reads “Pervert” with two palm leaves curled over her breasts. Here, Opie honors art history through subversive means, presenting a tender portrait of motherhood that fits less neatly into the archetype of the mother as a holy virgin.

The incisions seen on the artist’s chest in Nursing are fresh and still bleeding in Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994), in which Opie poses topless in front of an ornate golden backdrop, wearing a leather BDSM mask. Seated in a chair with her arms resting calmly on her lap—a pose often found in historical Western portraiture—her bare arms are pierced by rhythmic rows of needles. At MASP, this photo was paired with Francisco de Goya’s Portrait of Ferdinand VII (1808), in which the Spanish king holds the same tranquil pose, bearing a golden scepter in his right hand and wearing noble robes—signs of social distinction that Opie’s body modifications and references to kink upend.

The striking pairing of Opie’s Raven, 1990 (1990/ 2024) and Pietro Perugino’s St. Sebastian at the Column (1500–10) depicts undressed subjects with hands tied behind their backs in a position of penance and scourge. The Renaissance arcade in Perugino’s painting frames a placid, mountainous landscape typical of Italian paintings of the period, while a scantly clad Sebastian gazes upward, arrows digging into his skin. In contrast, Opie’s portrait pictures a nearly nude figure chained to a metal fence on top of a hill in Los Angeles, barbed wire trailing into the background. The subjects’ gazes in both works are directed upwards, inert, as if in resistance to humiliation and pain—a usual pose of Sebastian in Christian iconography as he awaits martyrdom. Sebastian has been recast as a queer icon by the LGBTQIA+ community,⁴ a subversion of the Catholic symbol of strength and perseverance that the curators lean into with this pairing, elevating Opie’s queer subject donned in chains to saintly status.

Genre/Gender/Portraiture critically reflected on the constructs of societal norms by challenging traditional notions of portraiture as containers for invention, contestation, and play. Subverting historical narratives embedded in the paired classical works and underscoring the importance of queer visibility alongside transhistorical and transcultural dialogue, the exhibition’s curation disrupted the rigid stylistic, chronological, and technical segregation of museum categorizations. The curatorial refusal to install artworks as traditional wallworks echoed Opie’s resistance to rigid social boundaries around gender identity and expression. The curation and transparent, maze-like installation questioned normative conventions determined by hegemonic structures of power. Through a revisitation and perversion of performativity and the agency of the pose, Opie’s exhibition advocates for a more fluid and inclusive understanding of human experience.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 38.

Mateus Nunes, PhD is a São Paulo-based writer, curator, and postdoctoral researcher from the Brazilian Amazon.

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