Lisa Oppenheim at MUDAM Luxembourg
Late to the show, too early to shop the look …
Because I only browse Instagram every few months, I’m late to discover that my old pal Lisa Oppenheim, an artist whom I’ve written about and whose work I acquired for my onetime employer, has an exhibition on view now at MUDAM Luxembourg. The curators of the show, Christophe Gallois and and Nathalie Lesure, invited Oppenheim to “respond to the multifaceted oeuvre of … the Luxembourg-born American artist Edward Steichen.” And as makes sense for a photographer long engaged with textiles (e.g., this 2024 exhibition), one aspect of Steichen’s work she riffs on is his incredible series of 1920s photographs made to be turned into fabric prints by the Stehli Silks corporation.
As Keshav Ananda writes in an article published a few days ago, “The artist doesn’t attempt to revise Steichen’s work so much as illuminate the blind spots around it.” To wit: “When I asked Oppenheim what struck her most while researching Steichen’s life and work, her answer was immediate: ‘All the women in his life that made it possible for him to be who he was. A strong mother, sister, three wives and two daughters.’” Oppenheim’s semiabstract and repeating patterns are displayed in the exhibition on freestanding folding screens, which also sometimes serve as the supports for other framed photographs, as above. (I don’t know which wife that one depicts …)
But also, as I wrote about the Steichen works a decade ago, part of their importance derives from how they employed new technologies to circulate beyond the confines of galleries and magazine pages. So I was really pleased to discover that Oppenheim created the patterns in collaboration with fashion designer Zoe Latta, who then integrated them into Eckhaus Latta’s AW25 collection. The Eckhaus Latta site has SS25 on the homepage, so I don’t think I can get something in time for Mother’s Day. But perhaps I can in time for the strong woman in my life’s November birthday …
