CATHERINE OPIE

This exhibition at Lehmann Maupin comes on the heels of the artist’s first major solo exhibition in Brazil, Catherine Opie: Genre/Gender/Portraiture, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, and Guilherme Giufrida, Assistant Curator, which closed last fall at The Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP).Catherine Opie: A Study of Blue Mountains precedes an exhibition of the Norwegian Mountain series at the Posten Moderne in Trondheim, Norway, as well as a major solo show at the National Portrait Gallery in London, both opening in 2026.For over four decades, Opie has been celebrated for her intimate portraiture and exploration of community and identity. Landscape has also been a central focus of her practice, spanning urban freeways, strip malls, Pacific Ocean surfers, and frozen Minnesota lakes, each reflecting her broader engagement with place and belonging. In this new body of work, Opie looks to the Norwegian landscape—long a source of inspiration for the artist—creating a powerful study of the rich range of blues found in the gradient variations within the Northern sky and the cascade of light blanketing the region’s most majestic mountains. Opie’s images emphasize a deeper, more personal interpretation of the color’s effect, in which the blue mountains symbolize an ascendance toward nature, and in turn, the power, grandeur, and change to nature itself.

Capturing subtle variations in light has become a life-long quest for Opie, who grew up observing the bluish atmosphere that washed over Lake Erie in Ohio. In these new photographs, Opie expands the scope of her portraiture to consider the shifting Norwegian terrain in the winter. Here, she captures the stillness and quality of winter light that imparts a deep blue to the landscape, and to do so, Opie would often wait hours for the right moment to take a photograph. The images of snow-capped mountainscapes encapsulate the haptic essence of the body’s sense of scale and environment, at once intimate and expansive. Across the exhibition, mountains become portraits of the beloved Norwegian landscape, connecting body and nature through the observation of color, light, and contrast. At the same time, the works in A Study of Blue Mountains are in pursuit of the perfect shade of blue, found somewhere between the beginnings and endings of dusk and dawn—a metaphor for the passage of time. Poetic in her execution, Opie’s photographs ruminate on the fleeting impermanence of time and how it shapes both the environment and our human experience.

To make this series, Opie traveled across Norway during the winter of 2024 to photograph an iconic mountain range. In works such as Untitled #5 (Norway Mountain) and Untitled #9 (Norway Mountain) (both 2024), shades of deep cerulean and azure blue build on her engagement with histories of art throughout her oeuvre, considering how the color has been used across generations. References including Picasso’s ‘Blue Period’, Derek Jarman’s film Blue, and the use of cerulean blue in the early Italian Renaissance make their way into Opie’s photographs. In this way, the use of blue evokes a sense of liminality—on the verge of something new and uncertain, yet ephemeral and transcendent, like history itself.

In conjunction with the debut of Opie’s Norwegian Mountain photographs, Catherine Opie: A Study of Blue Mountains will mark the first exhibition of the artist’s new ceramic mountain sculptures. Preceding the Norwegian Mountain photographs, the ceramic sculptures—and the process of making them—provided a meditative space for her to ruminate on the trip to Norway and the compositions she was to create. Since first working with clay in 2018, ceramic sculpture has become an extension of both the physical process and chance outcomes of photography. This shift in material has come to represent the hand of the artist, applied more forcibly in creating three-dimensional forms. Displayed on custom-made pedestals, the small-scale mountain sculptures create a kind of tension with the immersive scale of the photographs, merging the physicality between the body and landscape. In her photographs and ceramic works alike, Opie’s study of blue contemplates the deeper historical weight of this melancholic color and its resonance across time, memory, and landscape.