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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.
Biographies
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.
Edward Steichen (1879, Bivange, Luxembourg – 1973, West Redding, Connecticut) was one of the most important and prolific photographer of the twentieth century. Throughout his career, he constantly opened up his photographic practice to new genres and disciplines, often bluring the boundaries between the realm of art and the commercial uses of the medium. In the early 1900s, alongside Alfred Stieglitz, he was an important figure of the American pictorialism, a movement that sought to highlight the pictorial qualities of photography and bring it fully into fine arts. After the First World War, his practice moved towards a radically different style, marked by his work on light, clear lines and composition. In 1923, the Condé Nast publishing house recruited him as chief photographer for the magazines Vanity Fair and Vogue. In the 1920s and 1930s, he produced an impressive number of portraits of celebrities and public figures, as well as photographs for advertising. From 1947 to 1962, putting his photographic career on the side, he was the director of the Department of Photography at MoMA, New York, where he curated a large number of exhibitions. The most ambitious and best-known of these, The Family of Man (1955), toured the world during eight years and was presented in thirty-seven countries on six continents.