Catherine Opie Delves Into the Humanity of Elizabeth Taylor at MOCA

Lucy Tiven

This January, Catherine Opie: “700 Nimes Road” opens at MOCA. Inspired by William Eggleston’s “Graceland,” the Los Angeles artist presents a complex portrait of Elizabeth Taylor through images of her residence and its rooms, closets, shoes, clothing, mementos and jewelry.

Though viewers may be tempted to see Opie’s Taylor-fixation as a comment on celebrity, film mythos or Hollywood wealth and fame, the artist stresses that she is most interested in exploring “the relationship to what is human” in the actress rather than her legacy in pop culture or Hollywood lore.

Opie photographed Taylor’s Bel-Air residence over the course of six months, focusing on the spaces occupied by the actress as well as personal mementos.

The result, drawing from two series, “Closets and Jewels” and “700 Nimes Road” is a multi-dimensional portrait that goes beyond the surface of Taylor as film icon and emblem of Old Hollywood glamour, capturing Taylor’s complex humanity up-close and personal.

Catherine Opie was born in Ohio in 1961. Her photographs delve into American social phenomena using portraiture, landscape, and studio photography to express the psychological lives of groups and individual subjects ranging from political movements to queer subcultures and transformations of urban space. Her work wrestles with the relationships between time, aesthetic, legacy and human experience, while nodding to her education in the history of art and painting.

She received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1985), an MFA from CalArts (1988), and teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been awarded the President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Women’s Caucus for Art (2009); United States Artists Fellowship (2006); Larry Aldrich Award (2004); and the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts (2003). Her work has appeared in major exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2011); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2010); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008); MCA Chicago (2006); and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2002).

Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road is on view at MOCA from Jan. 21 to May 8.