Catherine Opie: Holding Blue
Regen Projects is pleased to present an exhibition of new photographs and sculptures by Catherine Opie. Marking her twelfth exhibition with the gallery, Holding Blue resonates between Opie’s investigations into the formal and theoretical qualities of the photographic medium and the singularities of the Norwegian landscape. Through meditations on temporality, embodiment, and the preciousness of the natural world, these works extend Opie’s longstanding practice of closely observing the social and physical world around her. This presentation comes amidst several landmark solo exhibitions for Opie at the Fridericianum, Kassel; National Portrait Gallery, London; PoMo, Trondheim; and the Royal Scottish Academy at National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh.
Opie’s Norway Mountains captures the countryside enveloped in the deep azure light of the Arctic Circle in polar winter. In January and February of 2024, the artist embarked on a road trip through the Nordic territory in search of this “blue hour.” Opie felt drawn to this light since her first trip to Norway in 2011, reminiscent of her childhood in Ohio gazing across the expanse of Lake Erie. Described by Opie as portraits she developed over spending days with each mountain, the photographs invoke the sublime grandeur of the Norwegian landscape through their immersive scale. For Opie, the unfiltered ultramarine hue is both a record of experiential truth and an evocation of elegiac mourning for the increasingly threatened natural environment. In her poetic ruminations on blue she expands upon the color’s art historical legacy, from the paintings of the Italian Renaissance to the transcendent works of modern and contemporary artists such as Pablo Picasso, Yves Klein, and Derek Jarman.
Two groups of ceramic sculptures, titled Before and After, illustrate Opie’s interpretation of the Norwegian mountains in anticipation of and following her trip. Opie developed the After series as the visiting artist at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in 2024 based on her recollection of each mountain. This body of work marks her second major engagement with ceramics after first exhibiting a series of sculptures in 2015. In her sculptures of the Norway mountains, Opie records her own haptic processing and meditation on the landscape, connecting physical form to spiritual contemplation of time and memory.
Opie further contemplates the Norwegian landscape, and the built forms that reside within it, in the photographic series Cliché—an engagement with the notion of Romantic beauty—and Vernacular—a depiction of local quotidian life. Images of backlit mountains, glowing horizons, contemporary and archaic architecture, and Norway’s majestic fjords continue Opie’s exploration of photography’s specificity and the history of landscape imagery. As Opie states of the work, “It felt to me that this fluidity of ancient life that I was bearing witness to moved me. I felt the energy of a place, and it’s so interesting when you spend that kind of time with the elements watching them, how they seep into your soul and there’s a certain longing for that experience again. The work creates this ability for me to understand that it was real.”
Catherine Opie (b. 1961 Sandusky, Ohio) received a BFAfrom the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFAfrom California Institute of the Arts. She is Professor Emerita and former Lynda and Stewart Resnick Endowed Chair in Art at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was a professor of photography from 2001 to 2023. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Current and upcoming solo exhibitions of her work include To Be Seen at the National Portrait Gallery, London (March 5–May 31, 2026) traveling to the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (August 8–November 1, 2026); The Pause That Dreams Against Erasure at Fridericianum, Kassel (February 14–July 19, 2026); and The Mountains Don’t Know Their Names at PoMo, Trondheim, Norway (June 25, 2026–January 3, 2027).
Other solo exhibitions include MASP, São Paulo (2024); Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2023); Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2017); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016 and 2010); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016 and 1997); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2015); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2014); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2011); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2006 and 2000–01); The Photographer’s Gallery, London (2000); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1997–98); among others. In 2016 she completed a monumental installation for the new Los Angeles Federal Courthouse.
Opie has received numerous honors and awards including the Los Angeles Center of Photography Stieglitz Award (2023); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden New York Gala Honoree (2019); John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Guggenheim Fellowship (2019); Smithsonian Archives of American Art Medal (2016); Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award(2013); Women’s Caucus for Art President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement (2009); United States Artists Fellowship (2006); Larry Aldrich Award (2004); Washington University Freund Fellowship (1999); and the Citibank Private Bank Emerging Artist Award (1997).
Her work is included in the permanent collections of numerous museums worldwide such as The Broad, Los Angeles; Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Portrait Gallery, London; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others.