For twenty years, American artist Geof Oppenheimer has been analyzing not only the nature of our social relations, but also the world’s political and economic issues. Through mediums like sculpture, installation, drawing and photography, he observes different communities building together, as they either collapse or help each other, in a form of continual instability. He attempts to establish a new dialogue, before changing the visitor’s perspective in a second phase.
For his first solo exhibition in France, the artist wished to create an in situ installation at the CRP/, Money Decades. He is also presenting the series of photo-sculptures The Therapy of groups, as well as drawings he has selected to show alongside a set of photographs from the CRP/ collection.
Whatever the medium used, he always views it as “sculpture”, because it enables him to go further in sharing an experience with his viewer, and it results from “manipulation of what constitutes the world”. Sculpture inserts and worms its way into the same physical space as the person viewing it, and the artist does not hesitate to characterize his work as “hyperrealism”, since he really confronts today’s social conditions, in order to articulate them differently and open new interpretations. In the United States and elsewhere, Geof Oppenheimer is one of the few visual artists to position himself so firmly in the analysis of economic intricacies within a practice that is highly assertive formally. His work tends to link intellectual reflection with physical experience, but as it is individually felt by each of us before embracing a collective destiny.
Geof Oppenheimer, born in Washington DC and lives and works in Chicago. He is a professor at the University of Chicago.