Catherine Opie: To Be Seen review – a bizarre collection of tattoos, fake mustaches and little kids in tutus | Photography

CAtherine OBE did for the butchers what Hans Holbein the Younger did for the Tudor nobility. Since graduating in the late 1980s, in the midst of the AIDS crisis, Opie has painted portraits of her community, friends, and family, drawing on the harsh realism, saturated colors, and dramatic tonal contrasts of 16th-century portrait painters. Many of Opie’s most famous photographs—included in her new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery—deliberately use these devices, an advertisement that these people deserve to see, as the exhibition’s title asserts.

Obi has always been interested in construction – how we can transform through costume, pose, pose, and role play. This show is a testament to that, and to her love of tattoos, piercings, and body modifications (she lives in Los Angeles, after all). She was particularly drawn to the performance and display of masculinity – in the 1991 “Being and Having” series, one of the show’s earliest acts and still one of Opie’s most famous. She has 13 lesbian friends who dress as their male alter egos – Opie also appears as her character, Bo. They wear a set of fake mustaches and are photographed in close-up, so their faces fill the frame against an egg-yolk yellow background, and the glue holding the hair to their faces is clearly visible. Their titles are engraved on name tags, as if they were trophies.

It’s fun, but your viewing of the images is heightened by the sense that this was the height of the AIDS crisis that was ravaging the queer community. More than a decade later, she photographed high school football players after practice in cities across the United States, their body-part-like uniforms and exaggerated projections of strength and power belied by their ambiguous adolescence.

The drama is heightened in her large-scale Baroque portraits, gathered here in a room painted crimson, black velvet curtains in the background lending gravity to her subjects (including fellow artists Mary Kelly and John Baldessari) in stately classical poses. They feel grand, historic, and timeless—like the paintings that hang throughout this gallery. They look like they belong here. Outside the gallery, Opie’s photographs are installed among 19th- and 20th-century oil paintings of “inspirational people” of importance and influence: her gorgeous, elegant portraits of Isaac Julien, Gillian Wearing, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and tattoo artist Alistair Fitt, fit so well, you can almost miss them.

The tension behind Opie’s work around adaptation is constantly evident in this show. In one photo, another friend, Raven, stands naked and chained, Christ-like, to a barbed wire fence at the top of a hill, an image that conveys boldness, courage and a feeling of being on the edge of the abyss. In another image, uncharacteristically soft natural light comes through a bathroom window and casts its glow on Pam, a figure in a bathtub with her back to the viewer, slightly bent, looking down—flying, as the title tells us. There is this constant pull between trickery and revelation, between imitation and subversion, between the collective and the individual, between stability and fluidity, between flattery and provocation.

Two self-portrait works from the 1990s, hung facing each other across space, perfectly embody these opposing forces: Opie’s Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993) and Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004). At first, we see only the pink flesh of Obi’s back, torn and bleeding, and a childlike image of a couple and a house etched into her skin. In the next image, we see Opie’s interpretation of that image, her own version of the Madonna and Child. She looks at her son Oliver as he is breastfeeding. Seeing this familiar work again, it seems radical and brave, in its unusual rawness. Every detail of Opie’s tattooed and scarred skin is revealed. Opie’s desire to tear, tear, and rebel coexists with her desire for a quiet domesticity, care, and comfort. Why shouldn’t that be?

The show moves in different side steps, through small rooms that allow for intimate and close encounters with the works, in the various areas of Opie’s practice, from the semi-abstract landscapes of the Cliffs of Dover that she painted during the Brexit referendum, to the portraits of lesbian couples and families at home, taken during a road trip across America. We see her documentation of the protests and marches, including dozens of handwritten posters plastered to a campus wall at the University of Southern California after protests over reports of sexual assault and drugging at the Sigma Nu fraternity. “Will I ever feel safe?” reads one poster.

In another series, surfers emerge from the water, refreshed and energetic with excitement; In one photo, Opie captures her son Oliver, still a toddler, wearing a miniskirt in the kitchen of the family home in Los Angeles. She was under Bush when the photo was taken, but what we see is a young woman, cheerful, full of possibility, secure. To Be Seen is about what is more necessary than what is visible: family, love and care. Protecting the private world that remains spared, at least in appearance, from acts of violence and abuse committed by the outside world.