LUXEMBOURG.- Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean presents Monsieur Steichen, a new exhibition by American artist Lisa Oppenheim. Through photographic, textile and floral works, Oppenheim offers an unexpected portrait of Edward Steichen, one of the most renowned yet enigmatic figures in twentieth-century photography.


Explore the fascinating world of Lisa Oppenheim's art! Delve into her unique approach to historical imagery with "Works 2003-2013," a comprehensive look at her first decade of work.


For two decades, Lisa Oppenheim (1975, New York) has been exploring photography’s history and its latent possibilities. In Monsieur Steichen, she focuses on little-known aspects of Steichen’s practice (1879, Bivange, Luxembourg – 1973, Redding, Connecticut), including his lifelong passion for flowers, his textile designs and his experimentations in the field of colour photography. The works produced for the exhibition build upon what the artist describes as Steichen’s ‘lost threads’ and ‘discarded ideas’, which are reimagined through her own artistic approach.

The exhibition opens with a series of photographic prints in which Oppenheim revives a now extinct variety of iris named ‘Monsieur Steichen’. She imagines how this flower, created in 1910 by a French amateur botanist as a tribute to Edward Steichen, could have looked using two photographic techniques from different epochs: dye transfer, used by Steichen in his 1930s-1940s colour experiments, and artificial intelligence, a transformative technology in contemporary image-making.

Another series of work revisits Steichen’s 1926–27 textile designs for the fabric manufacturer Stehli Silks’s Americana collection, which were based on black and white photographs he took of everyday objects, such as matchboxes, sugar cubes, sewing thread and buttons. In collaboration with fashion designer Zoe Latta, Oppenheim developed a collection of new fabrics based on motifs that Steichen ultimately did not use in his final works – several floral patterns and a nearly abstract photograph of gravel – reimagining these designs for today.

On the back of four folding screens displaying her textiles, Oppenheim hangs a selection of Steichen’s photographs of his three wives (Clara, Dana and Joanna), as well as his mother, Marie Kemp Steichen. These images were selected by Oppenheim from the collection of the Musée national d’archéologie, d’histoire et d’art in Luxembourg. Each folding screen is named after the woman whose image hangs on it.

Additional works complete the exhibition, including Oppenheim’s experimental photographic Steichen Studies (2024), which offer visitors a glimpse into her creative process. These pieces engage in a dialogue with a floral composition (Bouquet of Flowers (a photographic score) 1940/2025, 2025) which evolves throughout the exhibition, reflecting the colour variations found in Steichen’s own experiments in a series of dye transfer prints from 1940.

Outside of Mudam, in the museum’s moat, Oppenheim created Eduard’s Garden (2025), a living installation of delphiniums that echoes Steichen’s passion for these flowers and the groundbreaking exhibition of delphiniums he organised at MoMA in 1936. Eduard’s Garden will grow during the course of the exhibition and will blossom in June and July.

With the exhibition Monsieur Steichen, Lisa Oppenheim presents a subjective and abstract portrait of a pivotal twentieth-century figure, seen in the light of the present. Through her explorations of hybridisation – between techniques, disciplines, media, as well as between her own work and that of Steichen – she invites us to reimagine the infinite transformative potential of the image.

Lisa Oppenheim states: ‘In this exhibition, I would like to inhabit Steichen’s practice rather than examine any particular project. I plan to do with Steichen’s work what he did throughout his own long life and career: inhabit his tendency to ingest and reconstitute a wide range of practices and ideas and in that way hopefully expand an understanding of what it is to be a cultural producer.’

Curators

Christophe Gallois, assisted by Nathalie Lesure

Since the mid-2000s, American artist Lisa Oppenheim (1975, New York) has been developing a body of work that is rooted in the field of photography while also constantly exploring its margins. She often focuses on the unexplored potential of the medium’s artistic, technical and vernacular histories. Oppenheim’s work draws in depth enquiry that often takes on a life of its own – leading her down ‘a meandering path’ through which a combination of material and more scholarly research enables her projects to come into being. The artist transforms, or ‘reprocesses,’ as she describes it, images from the recent or more distant past by employing various creative mechanisms, both in the darkroom and through other media such as textile, and most recently, sculpture.

Lisa Oppenheim has had solo exhibitions at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2024); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2018); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2017); the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims (2015); the Kunstverein in Hamburg (2014) and the Grazer Kunstverein (2014). Her work has been shown in important group exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C (2024); the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2024 and 2015); the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2021); the Jewish Museum, New York (2021); the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013). Her work is held in various institutional collections including the Getty Center, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others.

Lisa Oppenheim lives and works in New York.


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