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What You Need to Know: On view through March 9, 2023 at Lehmann Maupin in New York, “Walls, Windows, and Blood” features the premiere of pivotal artist Catherine Opie’s most recent body of work. Taken across Vatican City, the photographs mine its inherent power structures—both literally, through the locale’s architecture, and subliminally, engaging with the Catholic Church’s history and legacy. Contending with the politics of place and how it intersects with ideas around identity, the images tap into the vast, multilayered elements that compose the current moment in human history and explores how physical and social hierarchies are affected. The collection of photographs was taken in the summer of 2021 over a period of six weeks while Opie was working as the Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography at the American Academy in Rome. Working in the shadow of the pandemic, the Vatican and surrounding areas were emptier than normal, offering Opie unparalleled access and opportunity to shoot.

About the Artist: American photographer Catherine Opie (b. 1961) is most widely recognized for her unflinching, often poignant color portraits that investigate facets of contemporary society through series that focus on specific groups of people—such as LGBTQ+ communities or high school sports players.

Her practice frequently references autobiography, queer culture, and collective experiences, touching on simultaneously personal yet universal themes. Known for pursuing distinct lines of inquiry across multiple series, within “Walls, Windows, and Blood” similar ideas can be traced to other recent bodies of work, such as “Rhetorical Landscapes” from 2019 and “The Modernist” from 2017. While the latter wrestled with concepts around political and global turmoil, and the former incongruities between America as an idealized model and America on the brink, the present series on view also uses a palette of power and identity and their myriad complexities to create new perspectives.

Why We Like It: The intricate, historical architecture that fills the walls of Vatican City operates within Opie’s images almost as a collaborator—working as framing device, compositional structure, and physical metaphor. Aligned with Opie’s longstanding affinity for surveying and investigating power structures and systems, coupled with the comparable emptiness of spaces of life, each image offers observers a contemplative moment to reflect on the specific view or vantage point of the composition, and consider the ways that the built environment and the activity it contains supports and promulgates the power of the Catholic Church and Catholicism. Adding the magnitude of these conceptual endeavors is the ability of Opie to capture the mass and scale of the architecture; many of the images are conveyed through a monumental reproduction process, resulting in photographs that reach upwards of seven feet, taller than most viewers. Incorporating scale internally and in the context of the space in which the image is viewed calls forth another recurring theme in Opie’s practice, that of complexities that can be found not only on the individual level, but societal, cultural, and political as well.

See featured works below.

Catherine Opie, No Apology (June 5, 2021) (2023). © Catherine Opie. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.

Catherine Opie, Blood Grid #1 (2023). © Catherine Opie. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.

Catherine Opie, Untitled #11 (Windows) (2023). © Catherine Opie. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.

Catherine Opie, Untitled #13 (Walls) (2023). © Catherine Opie. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.

Catherine Opie, Untitled #10 (Walls) (2023). Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.

“Catherine Opie: Walls, Windows, and Blood” is on view At Lehmann Maupin, New York, through March 9, 2024.