Regen Projects is pleased to present an exhibition of new photographs and sculptures by Catherine Opie. Marking her twelfth exhibition with the gallery, Holding blue resonates between Opie’s investigations into the formal and theoretical qualities of the photographic medium and the singularities of the Norwegian landscape. Through meditations on temporality, embodiment, and the preciousness of the natural world, these works extend Opie’s longstanding practice of closely observing the social and physical world around her. This presentation comes amidst several landmark solo exhibitions for Opie at the Fridericianum, Kassel; National Portrait Gallery, London; PoMo, Trondheim; and the Royal Scottish Academy at National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh.

Opie’s Norway mountains captures the countryside enveloped in the deep azure light of the Arctic Circle in polar winter. In January and February of 2024, the artist embarked on a road trip through the Nordic territory in search of this “blue hour.” Opie felt drawn to this light since her first trip to Norway in 2011, reminiscent of her childhood in Ohio gazing across the expanse of Lake Erie. Described by Opie as portraits she developed over spending days with each mountain, the photographs invoke the sublime grandeur of the Norwegian landscape through their immersive scale. For Opie, the unfiltered ultramarine hue is both a record of experiential truth and an evocation of elegiac mourning for the increasingly threatened natural environment. In her poetic ruminations on blue she expands upon the color’s art historical legacy, from the paintings of the Italian Renaissance to the transcendent works of modern and contemporary artists such as Pablo Picasso, Yves Klein, and Derek Jarman.

Two groups of ceramic sculptures, titled Before and After, illustrate Opie’s interpretation of the Norwegian mountains in anticipation of and following her trip. Opie developed the After series as the visiting artist at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in 2024 based on her recollection of each mountain. This body of work marks her second major engagement with ceramics after first exhibiting a series of sculptures in 2015. In her sculptures of the Norway mountains, Opie records her own haptic processing and meditation on the landscape, connecting physical form to spiritual contemplation of time and memory.

Opie further contemplates the Norwegian landscape, and the built forms that reside within it, in the photographic series Cliché—an engagement with the notion of Romantic beauty—and Vernacular—a depiction of local quotidian life. Images of backlit mountains, glowing horizons, contemporary and archaic architecture, and Norway’s majestic fjords continue Opie’s exploration of photography’s specificity and the history of landscape imagery. As Opie states of the work, “It felt to me that this fluidity of ancient life that I was bearing witness to moved me. I felt the energy of a place, and it’s so interesting when you spend that kind of time with the elements watching them, how they seep into your soul and there’s a certain longing for that experience again. The work creates this ability for me to understand that it was real.”