Lisa Oppenheim

Certain through-lines visible in Lisa Oppenheim’s work suggest the many ways the history of photography can be a lineage of impossibly wide potential for an artist whose practice is inseparable from her research. Using various means, including but not strictly limited to photography, Oppenheim draws upon the resources of libraries, collections, and online repositories that become a point of departure for work that is layered and at times starkly abstract. Reaching back into documentary archives, for example, Oppenheim examines the overlooked outtakes of great photographers that were, for whatever reason, excised from the historical record, resurrecting them in her imagery. These missing links and obscure finds have technical corollaries in her work as well. Her images often focus on fragments and play with exposures to suggest the nuances of what is seen and unseen, revealed and hidden, by the mechanics of the camera and chemistry of processing. In her multifaceted work, she can invoke photography’s most complex functions: the capacity to remain completely mute while seeming to describe the world in infinite detail.

- Darsie Alexander, 2021

Download Artist's CV

Lisa Oppenheim was born in 1975 in New York City, where she currently lives and works. She received her BA from Brown University in 1998, and later and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College in 2001. She also attended the Whitney Independent Study Program from 2002-2003 and the Rijksakademie van beeldedne kunsten in Amsterdam from 2004-2006.

Oppenheim’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2024), Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2017), Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2016), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (2015), Kunstverein in Hamburg (2014), Grazer Kunstverein, (2014). In 2014, Oppenheim was the recipient the AIMIA|AGO Photography Prize from the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Shpilman International Photography Prize from the Israel Museum. Notable group exhibitions include Nineteenth-Century Photography Now, The Getty Center, Los Angeles (2024); Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, curated by Lynne Cooke, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LA [traveling to National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 2024; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2024; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2025]; Songs of the Sky: Photography & the Cloud, Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France (2022), Afterlives, The Jewish Museum, New York (2021); Off the Record, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2021); The Moon, Grand Palais, Paris (2019); Killed Negatives: Introducing America to Americans, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018); Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography, The Getty Center, Los Angeles (2015), Photo-Poetics, Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, Berlin and Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015), AIMIA|AGO Photography Prize Exhibition, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2014), and New Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (2013).

Oppenheim's work is held in the permanent collections of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, and the Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, among others.

Lisa Oppenheim: Spine