The Approach is pleased to present Portraits/Hybrids by Lisa Oppenheim in The Annexe. Over the last two decades, Lisa Oppenheim has developed a body of work that is rooted in the photography while expanding the medium in order to examine its other material, media and their corresponding histories. For her most recent body of work, Oppenheim transforms and embodies the practice of one of the twentieth century’s most well-known yet enigmatic artists whose multifaceted career spanned nearly eighty years: Edward Steichen (1879-1973).
Steichen, a photographer, designer, curator, and flower hybridiser, viewed his flower cultivation on the same level as his photographic practice, on par with his work producing and designing exhibitions, books, watches, textiles and in 1928, a piano.
In a new series of photographic prints, Oppenheim revives a now- extinct variety of iris named Monsieur Steichen, which was created in 1910 by an amateur botanist as a tribute to Steichen. There are no known photographs of Mons. Steichen, nor extant examples of the flower. Oppenheim’s works bring this flower back to life using photographic techniques from two very different eras: dye transfer, which Steichen himself used in the 1930s and 40s, and artificial intelligence. Through AI technology, Oppenheim created images of hypothetical hybrids by merging images of the two varieties of iris that were originally used to create Mons. Steichen, creating possible offspring from each parent variety. She then produced analogue prints of the AI generated images using the labour–intensive and almost entirely extinct process of dye transfer printing. Using her own 'incorrect' colour combinations, Oppenheim creates a vast range of possible Mons. Steichen that explores the concepts of both genetic and photographic verisimilitude.
Lisa Oppenheim (b. 1975, New York, USA) lives and works in New York (NY), USA. She received her BA from Brown University in 1998, and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College in 2001. She also attended the Whitney Independent Study Program from 2002-2003 and the Rijksakademie van beeldedne kunsten in Amsterdam from 2004-2006.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Les Rencontres d’Arles, FR (forthcoming July 2026); Ourselves and the Expressions of Ourselves, Tanya Bonakdar, New York (NY), USA; Monsieur Steichen, MUDAM, Luxembourg, LU (both 2025); Spolia, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, NL, (2024). Recent group exhibition include: Imaging After Photography, Moody Center for the Arts Rice University, Houston (TX), USA (2026); Does the flower hear the bee?, Shanghai Biennale, The Power Station of Art, Shanghai, CN; Woven Histories, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (NY), USA (both 2025); New Sun-Worshippers: Nineteenth-Century Photography Now, The Getty Center, Los Angeles (LA), USA (2024).
Oppenheim’s work is held in the permanent collections of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, among others.