Dennis Oppenheim

From Artsy

Dennis Oppenheim’s vast, unpredictable oeuvre spanned Conceptual, performance, land, and body art; the artist made pioneering sculptures, films, and photographs throughout his life. He rose to prominence in the 1960s with ephemeral interventions into the landscape—he cut patterns cut into an expansive wheatfield and shoveled concentric rings into a snowy plain—and later mined his own body for material. In Reading Position for Second Degree Burn (1970), for example, he lay in the sun for five hours, sunburning the shape of a book onto his chest. By the mid-1990s, Oppenheim was renowned for large-scale, Pop-inflected sculptures and permanent installations that blended elements of sculpture and architecture. Among his best-known works is Device to Root Out Evil, a church standing on its steeple that he installed at the 1997 Venice Biennale. Oppenheim has been the subject of shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum Ludwig, Kunsthalle Basel, and the Museo Reina Sofía. His work has sold for six figures at auction and belongs to dozens of prestigious public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Stedelijk Museum, and the Centre Pompidou.