Lisa Oppenheim: Monsieur Steichen: MUDAM, The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg

For this exhibition, Lisa Oppenheim (1975, New York) has been invited to create a new body of work in response to the multifaceted oeuvre of one of the most renowned yet enigmatic figures in twentieth century’s photography: the Luxembourg-born, American photographer and curator Edward Steichen (1879–1973). Through photo-graphic, textile and floral works, Oppenheim unveils an unexpected portrait of ‘Monsieur Steichen’.

For two decades, Lisa Oppenheim has been exploring photography’s history and its latent possibilities. In this exhibition, she focuses on little-known aspects of Edward Steichen’s practice, including his lifelong passion for flowers, his textile designs and his experimentations in the field of colour photography. The works produced for the exhibition build upon what she describes as Steichen’s ‘lost threads’ and ‘discarded ideas’, which are reimagined through her own artistic approach.

The exhibition opens with a series of photographic prints in which Oppenheim revives a now-extinct variety of iris named ‘Monsieur Steichen’, which was created in 1910 by a French amateur botanist as a tribute to Steichen. Oppenheim’s prints bring this flower back to life using two photographic techniques from different epochs: dye transfer, used by Steichen in his 1930–1940s colour experiments, and artificial intelligence.

Another series of works revisits textile designs created by Steichen in 1926–27 from black and white photographs of everyday objects. In collaboration with fashion designer Zoe Latta, Oppenheim developed a collection of new fabrics based on motifs Steichen ultimately did not use for his final designs: several floral patterns and a nearly abstract photograph of gravel.

The exhibition also includes a selection of Steichen’s photographs of his three wives (Clara, Dana and Joanna) and his mother (Marie Kemp Steichen), as well as a series of ‘studies’ (Steichen Studies, 2024) that offer a glimpse into Oppenheim’s creative process.

Finally, outside of Mudam, in the park surrounding the museum, Oppenheim will create Eduard’s Garden (2025), a living installation of delphiniums that echoes Steichen’s passion for these flowers. Eduard’s Garden will grow during the exhibition and will blossom in June and July.

With Monsieur Steichen, Lisa Oppenheim presents a subjective and abstract portrait of a pivotal twentieth-century figure, seen in the light of the present. Through her explorations of hybridisation – between techniques, disciplines, as well as between her own work and that of Steichen –, she invites us to reimagine the infinite transformative potential of the image.

Since the mid-2000s, American artist Lisa Oppenheim (1975, New York) has been developing a body of work that is rooted in the field of photography while also constantly exploring its margins. She often focuses on the unexplored potential of the medium’s artistic, technical and vernacular histories. Oppenheim’s work draws in-depth enquiry that often takes on a life of its own – leading her down ‘a meandering path’ through which a combination of material and more scholarly research enables her projects to come into being. The artist transforms, or ‘reprocesses,’ as she describes it, images from the recent or more distant past by employing various creative mechanisms, both in the darkroom and through other media such as textile, and most recently, sculpture.

Lisa Oppenheim has had solo exhibitions at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2024); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2018); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2017); the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims (2015); the Kunstverein in Hamburg (2014) and the Grazer Kunstverein (2014). Her work has been shown in important group exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C (2024); the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2024 and 2015); the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2021); the Jewish Museum, New York (2021); the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013). Her work is held in various institutional collections including the Getty Center, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others. Lisa Oppenheim lives and works in New York.

Images: 

Installation view, Lisa Oppenheim: Monsieur Steichen, Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, February 14 – August 24, 2025. 

Photo: Mareike Tocha 

© Mudam Luxembourg