CATHERINE OPIE

Marking Opie’s debut solo exhibition in Korea, To Your Shore From My Shore And Back Again features over 25 landscapes and portraits, many of which have never before been exhibited. Installed in two distinct but interrelated groupings across Lehmann Maupin’s Seoul gallery, works from the artist’s iconic 1990s Portraits are presented together on the ground floor, while the top floor houses From Your Shore to My Shore, an immersive installation of seascapes. Although the artist frequently works in series, this curated presentation of historic work allows for a more expansive approach to exhibition making and offers a break from seriality. For To Your Shore From My Shore And Back Again, Opie mines her archive and brings discrete bodies of work into dialogue to suggest new connections and identify throughlines that have cut across her practice for the last 30 years.

The grouping of Portraits features new images from now iconic sittings, including Justin Bond and Vaginal Davis, among many others. Opie produced this series in the mid-1990s, photographing gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals from her circle of friends and artists in San Francisco. Set against a backdrop of vibrant, monochromatic colour—inspired by master portraitist Hans Holbein the Younger—Opie’s sparse backgrounds throw the body and distinguishing features of each individual into sharp relief, creating portraits that at once capture the personality of each sitter while simultaneously documenting a larger community. Opie has referred to this body of work as imaging her ‘royal family,’ and the portraits in this series are imbued with a sense of regal formality. In one photograph, Raelyn Gallina (1994), the subject is seated on a wooden armchair, partially covered by a lush red velvet drape. The figure’s pose is relaxed, radiating self assurance and authority, while her gaze hovers somewhere between defiance and disinterest.

Puncturing the group of portraits are the only new works in the exhibition, My Shore (2022) and Our Moon (2021), two landscapes that link the lower floor to the seascapes above. Comprised of 13 photographs, From Your Shore to My Shore fills the upper room, anchored by an unbroken horizon line that extends seemingly out of frame, uniting each photograph. The images were shot in 2009, when the artist traveled on a container ship from Korea to Long Beach, California. Capturing the sunrise and sunset on each day of the ten-day journey, Opie’s compositions contain equal registers of water and sky, separated by the thin line of the horizon. The lack of distinguishing background features creates a sense of universality—it is impossible to know which photographs were taken in Korean, American, or international waters—suggesting a shared global landscape visible, and accessible, from any location. In dialogue with the portraits presented in the room below, the horizon becomes both an equalising line and a connective thread, expanding the scope of community from your shore to mine.