Lisa Oppenheim

NoguerasBlanchard is pleased to present a new exhibition programme in the gallery’s space in Barcelona. The Story Behind curated by Direlia Lazo (Havana, 1984), consists of a series of presentations by established or emerging international artists over the period of one year.

Much of contemporary art is recreated in the story about itself, stories that mediate between the work and the viewer either to convey the artist’s intention, explain the working process that underlies the images, or reveal deliberate and purposeful interpretations. To narrate, to recount, to explain the interpretive universe surrounding our direct experience becomes another feature of these works. The Story Behind presents a group of works where stories, whether fictional or real, manifest and embody that oral and paralell world that accompanies the images.

The first instalment of the exhibition cycle presents the work Heliograms 1876/2011, 2011 by Lisa Oppenheim (New York, 1975). The photographs are the result of exposing an image of the sun from July 8th, 1876 to sunlight over and over again. The exposures occurred eight times a day, once every two hours, starting at dawn and continuing through dusk, beginning with the vernal equinox and extending through the following months. The images presented here were made on July 27th, 2011.

Heliograms 1876/2011 appeals to Oppenheim’s interest in expanding the possibilities of appropriation, reconstruction and interpretation of archival materials. Unlike previous endeavours where the artist re-photographed on-site spaces and places found in archival images (Killed Negatives, 2002-2006) or where she established a relation of reference and substitution between images taken in different contexts (The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else, 2006) in Heliograms 1876/2011 the artist adds further complexity to the process of reproduction of an archival image and strips the image of its documentary value as it contains another set of temporalities, beyond the take of July 8, 1876.

Lisa Oppenheim lives and works in New York. She is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and received an MFA in 2002 from Bard College. From 2004 to 2005 she was a fellow at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitions include: Everyone’s Camera, Kunstverein Göttingen, Göttingen (2013); Vapours and Veils, Klosterfelde, Berlín (2012); Equivalents, Harris Lieberman, New York (2012); Open Source, UC Riverside/California Museum of Photography, Riverside (2009). Recent group shows include: The Appearance of Image, Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris (2013); Kadist: Pathways into a Collection, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2012); Lisa Oppenheim – Double, ICA, London (2012); Found in Translation, Guggenheim Museum, New York /Deutsche Guggenheim Museum, Berlín (2012); Performa 11, New York (2011); The Indiscipline of Painting Screening, Tate St. Ives, UK (2011); What Makes Free Will Free (With Melissa Gordon), Temporary Stedelijk, Amsterdam (2011); Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2010), and From John to Sebastian: tank.tv at Tate Modern, Tate Modern, London (2009).