Dennis Oppenheim turned the artworld literally on its head and did not miss an opportunity to take his creative rebellion out onto the streets, where he sought confrontation with the bourgeois public. He met his critics with cynical humour and never took cover - many of his works are still shockingly relevant today.
(...) Continue readingDennis Oppenheim - Art teacher in New York; start of the Earth Work Project
Dennis Oppenheim was born on 6th September 1938 in Electric City, Washington. He graduated from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and from 1958, spent four years on the island of Hawaii, in Honolulu, where he earned his living as a construction worker and in public relations. Even at that time, however, Oppenheim was already an artist at heart and created his first works with cautious, tentative curiosity. In 1965, he finally obtained a Master's degree from the prestigious Stanford University. In 1966, he moved to New York to finally devote himself fully to art - not only as a student, but also as a teacher of art at various schools, including the famous Yale University. In 1968, he had his first solo exhibition at the John Gibson Gallery and together with his artist friends Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, created his first Earth Work Project.
Radical art beyond the pain threshold
In the 1970s, Dennis Oppenheim radically advanced his artistic development and made a name for himself above all as an uncompromising representative of Body Art. He created art films such as Material Exchange, in which he tore out part of his own fingernail and then deliberately drove a splinter into the bloody nail bed – an art that did not appeal to all viewers. However, throughout his life, Oppenheim did not shy away from confrontation with his own audience. On the contrary, he preferred to stage his art in public spaces, where he encountered people's everyday lives and could stir them up. These provocations did not always work in his favour, however: when he installed a six-metre-high upside-down wooden church in a Vancouver park in 1997, it sparked massive protests from local residents. In the end, the work with the telling name Device to Root Out Evil had to be dismantled - and Dennis Oppenheim emphatically assured that his art was indeed aggressive, but certainly not meant to be blasphemous.
Room-filling installations; numerous solo exhibitions
The artist's impressive list of exhibitions includes two Documenta participations and numerous others. Oppenheim's installations became larger and larger, taking up more and more space as his preoccupation with his own body as a part of art gave way to extensive installations made of stone, wood and metal. The artist also repeatedly criticised the current developments that caused him concern - in 1989, he fuelled the smouldering debate about dioxin-contaminated animals with a staging of plastic animal heads holding their own bodies as prey in their mouths. From 1982 until his death, Dennis Oppenheim was married to the American sculptor Alice Aycock. Together, the creative couple built the ‘Ghost Towns’ and several tree houses.
Dennis Oppenheim died on 21st January 2011 in New York City at the age of 72.
Dennis Oppenheim - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
