Peder Lund is pleased to announce its second exhibition with the American photographer Catherine Opie. Since the early 1990s, Opie has produced a diverse body of work in genres such as studio portraiture, landscape photography and street photography, with which she has investigated notions of communal, sexual and cultural identity in contemporary America. In her exhibition at Peder Lund, Opie will be presenting 14 new portraits and landscapes that refer to both her longstanding interest in the relationship between figure and landscape, as well the tradition of portraiture and the history of photography. The exhibition opens June 21 and will be on view until September 13, 2014.

Opie’s work remains highly aesthetic and technically masterful, whilst tackling both societal and art-historical subject matters. The photographs on view at Peder Lund are part of Opie’s most recent series of portraits and landscapes, in which she evokes the psychological and material spaces depicted in 17th- and 18th-century portrait painting. Opie has depicted transgendered acquaintances, fellow artists and high achievers heavily lit against dark backgrounds or in the classical silhouette shape customary in the 17th Century. She has replaced the objects that helped the viewer identify the social status and occupation of the sitter in classical portraiture with contemporary signs of identity; Opie’s sitters reveal their tattoos, or, as in the case of the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, who swam from Havana to Key West in 2013, her distinct tan lines from the swimsuit and -cap she wore during her swim. Set against the portraits is a series of sublime landscapes in sharp, though simultaneously grainy, colours.