Artist's Talk Dennis Oppenheim

Join us to hear a seminal figure in contemporary art discuss his career and new directions in his work.

Over the past four decades, Dennis Oppenheim has constantly reinvented his artistic practice, creating a body of work that includes earthworks, body art, performance, sculpture, videos, and photographs. Among his best-known early works is Reading Position for Second Degree Burn (1970), which documents his laying in the sun for five hours with a book on his chest. Oppenheim's more recent work, examples of which can be currently seen in the Franklin Park Conservatory's Bending Nature exhibition, combines architecture, sculpture, and landscape in surprising and sometimes controversial ways.

This program is part of the Reconfigured Vision: Technology Expanding Art Peripherals Lecture Series in which artists and curators discuss the ramifications and importance of imaging technology to art making.

Cosponsored by Ohio State's Department of Art and supported by the Battelle Endowment for Technology and Human Affairs.

Keep reading for more information on Dennis Oppenheim. Oppenheim was born in 1938 in Electric City, Washington, and currently lives in New York City. He received his B.F.A. from the School of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, and an M.F.A. from Stanford University. In the late sixties, Oppenheim was a pioneering figure in several directions of conceptual art, creating projects that involved large-scale earthworks, body and performance art, and video. In a series of works produced between 1970 and 1974, Oppenheim used his own body as a site to challenge the self and explored the boundaries of personal risk, transformation, and communication.

A new chapter of his work began in the early 1980s, as he turned to machine pieces, complex constructions that he used to create a metaphor for the artistic process. (In September 1985, one such machine piece, a contraption of huge hands titled Power Fingers: Extended Fortunes, was used to symbolically break ground for what became the Wexner Center.) By the mid-1980s his sculpture was based on the transformation of everyday objects. Since the mid-1990s, his work has become larger in scale and often permanent, fusing sculpture and architecture.

Oppenheim has exhibited his works internationally in galleries and museums including the Tate Gallery, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Galerie Pro Arte, Germany; and the Joseph Helman Gallery, New York. He has received commissions from many venues including Ballerup Kommune, Copenhagen; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Olympic Park, South Korea. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and his varied work was recognized with a lifetime achievement award at the 2007 Vancouver Sculpture Biennale.