Dennis Oppenheim - Work

Work

Coming out of the conceptual art movement, Oppenheim's early work was associated both with performance/body art and the early earthworks/land art movement. From 1966-68, Oppenheim's ephemeral earthworks included shapes cut in ice/snow — such as "Annual Rings" (1968), a series of rings carved in the snow on the U.S.A./Canada border, and "Gallery Transplant" (1969), in which he cut the outline of a gallery in the snow, patterns cut in wheat fields with combine harvesters, and giant overlapping fingerprints representing the artist and his son Eric sprawled across several acres of a spoils field in Lewiston, NY. He was included with Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and Robert Morris in the important 1968 Earthworks show at the Dwan Gallery in New York.

Also in 1968, Oppenheim became friends with Vito Acconci and he began producing body art, such as "Reading Position for Second Degree Burn" (1970), for which he lay in the sun for five hours with an open book on his chest. In the early 1970s, he was in the vanguard of artists using film and video in relation to performance.

In the early 1980s, he began his "machine pieces", complex, space-filling devices, and after the mid-1980s, he worked on the "transformation of everyday objects in art." From the mid-1990s, he created a number of large-scale public art pieces in major cities around the world, some of which proved controversial.

He received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was included in both the Venice Biennale and the Johannesburg Biennale in 1997. In 2007, he was recognized for Lifetime Achievement at the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale.