"People in Reverse", 2019-2021, Building materials, cast bronze, cast aluminum, textiles, leather, digital animation with augmented monitor arm, nylon webbing, enamel paint, laboratory cart, melamine, pigment print, chromogenic color print, digital projector, doors.

For more than twenty years, artist Geof Oppenheimer has utilized mediums including sculpture, video, drawing, and photography to analyze not only how we relate to one another, but also how these personal relations intersect with broader social and economic issues. “People in Reverse” is Oppenheimer’s first solo exhibition in China and features new work commissioned by UCCA and Diriyah Biennale Foundation. It centers on cast statues of three archetypal figures—the businessman, the flag bearer, and the observer—situated within an immersive spatial context formed out of walls, floor coverings, raw materials, and mass-produced products. These sculptures and their environment speak to the growing concerns over symbolism, figuration, and character in the modern social economy. The exhibition foregrounds the artist’s use of the body as a medium to convey contemporary conditions, underscoring how the visual arts can transmit feelings that are, by their very nature, overpowering and ineffable. A publication designed by the artist and David Giordano will serve as an essential component of the exhibition, featuring commissioned essays by the art historian David Getsy, dramaturge Zhao Chuan, and UCCA Director Philip Tinari.

Geof Oppenheimer, The Observer 2019-2021 (detail), cast bronze, paint, medical cart, MDO, laminate, braided leather, 147 × 61 × 89 cm.

About the Artist

Geof Oppenheimer (b. 1973, Washington D.C., lives and works in Chicago) studied at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, where he received his BFA, and received an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an associate professor of practice in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. Oppenheimer takes up questions of civic value: the ways in which political and social structures are encoded in images and objects, and how meaning is formed in the modern world. Trained as a sculptor, Oppenheimer works across multiple mediums, including stage-set video productions and photography. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at a variety of venues, such as the CRP, Paris; Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston; MoMA PS1, New York; The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; 4th Athens Biennale; and CAB Art Center, Brussels. His work has been the subject of published writings in Art in America, The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, and The New Yorker.

About the Exhibition

Dates: 2022.12.23 - 2023.4.9

Venue: Central Gallery, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.

Courtesy of the Artist and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.