Dennis Oppenheim

Recently recognized for Lifetime Achievement at the 2007 Vancouver Sculpture Biennale, Dennis Oppenheim has exhibited his works internationally in museums and private and public collections 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; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, U.S.A.; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona, U.S.A.; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.; Oulu Art Museum, Oulu, Finland; Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, Florida, U.S.A.; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Kyungkido, Korea; National Gallery of Art, Ottawa, Canada; Museum of Modern Art, Heide Park, Melbourne, Australia; Musee National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, France; Hiroshima City Museum, Hiroshima City, Japan; Ballerup Kommune, Copenhagen; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Olympic Park, South Korea among many others.

 Oppenheim received his B.F.A from the School of Arts and Crafts and an M.F.A. from Stanford University. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In the late sixties he created projects which embrace Earth and Body Art, Video and Performance Art. In a series of works produced between 1970 and 1974, Oppenheim used his own body as a site to challenge the self: he explored the boundaries of personal risk, transformation, and communication. In 1981 he opened a new chapter, with machine pieces, and complex constructions which he used to create a metaphor for the artistic process. By the mid-eighties his sculpture was based on the transformation of everyday objects. Since the mid-ninties his work has become larger in scale and permanent, fusing sculpture and architecture.

With sculpture in almost every city in the world, Dennis Oppenheim is one of the foremost figures working in the field of public sculpture today.