Against patterned blue wallpaper like a rich backdrop in a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, a young woman with a buzz cut sits with her nude back towards the viewer. That is the subject of a portrait in this beautifully designed new exhibition of crisp \u2013 though often blatant \u2013 work by the American photographer Catherine Opie, which exemplifies her approach.<\/p>\n
Every freckle on the shoulders and back of Opie\u2019s friend Steakhouse is visible, but the focal point is a tattoo, in gothic script, across her neck: \u201cDyke\u201d. Since she emerged on the West Coast in the 1990s, Opie has made \u201crepresentation\u201d her artistic mission, and become a sort of poster girl for the recent turn in art history towards identity politics.<\/p>\n
In her early work, she depicted her queer friends (i.e. the kind of people who, in those days, didn\u2019t figure much on the walls of museums) in the manner of Old Master portraiture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Against patterned blue wallpaper like a rich backdrop in a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, a young…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":328876,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[2273,307,304,305,306,269,151988,308,93,4197,61,60,2974,266,563],"class_list":["post-328875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-culture","tag-culture-editors-choice","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-exhibitions","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-national-portrait-gallery","tag-photography","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}