Geof Oppenheimer’s practice 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 our modern world. Starting from the proposition that formal value is a social value, his projects interrogate the forms and rules of civic discourse as a material, positing art as a space of liberated social dialogue. 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 in France, the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, PS1/MOMA, The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, SITE Santa Fe, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Aspen Art Museum, The 4th Athens Biennale, The Institute for Contemporary Art in Richmond Virginia and the CAB Art Center, Brussels. His work has been the subject of published writings in Art in America, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune and The New Yorker. He studied at the Maryland Institute, College of Art where he received his BFA and received an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. He also studied at the Academia voor Beeldende Vorming in the Netherlands. Geof Oppenheimer is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago and lives and works in Chicago, Illinois
Selected Publications
The Hysterical Material
Big Boss and the Ecstasy of Pressures
