Dennis Oppenheim

Dennis Oppenheim is a conceptual sculptor whose early work pioneered land art, performance, body art and conceptual sculpture. From the 1980s forward, Oppenheim focused on sculpture, installation and public art in which commonplace imagery and industrial armatures combine in humorous interrogation of each other. In Garden of Evidence, first shown at Ace Gallery in 2008, Oppenheim presented puzzle-like cacti totems. The ovoid-shaped segments of the cacti are rendered in building materials sourced from police forensic sites in Scottsdale Arizona. It’s an unsettling reference at odds with Garden‘s whimsical appearance.

In Device to Root Out Evil, a signature public work from 1997, a country church is rendered in aluminum and steel, inverted and cantilevered, it’s steeple pointing into the earth. In Journey Home (2009) a simplified house shape becomes a spiraling tube suggesting transit infrastructure in scale, and mollusk shell in form.

“You are operating on the operation, not the thing. When you are operating on the operation you have found a way to separate yourself from the things and you operate in a more intangible way.”

Oppenheim was included in the landmark exhibition of post-minimal and conceptual art, “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form” organized by Harald Szeeman at Kunsthalle Berne in 1969. Oppenhiem’s work was exhibited in the Venice Biennale in 1976, 1980 and 2000, and Documenta in Kassel in 1972 and 1977; and has been represented in solo exhibitions at Tate Gallery, London (1972); the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1979); and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1983, 2003); and major retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1974); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (1976); Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montreal (1978); and P.S.1 in New York (1991).