"I´m working mainly by the feeling of an intuitive motion. I was aware this is always there to deal with, but when I was younger, I opted more for intellectual and philosophical strategies.
Things in my life would rarely enter the work, then. Now they do, as well as my trust in my intuitons."
Oppenheim was born in 1938 in Washington State. In 1958, while attending the Caifornia College of arts and Crafts, he married and moved to Honolulu where his first child was born.
In 1966 he moved to New York where he began to socialize with contemporary artists (Smithson, Heizer) and had his first one person show at the John Gibson Gallery in 1968, followed by a show in Paris in 1969.
Over the next years he exhibited and lectured extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe. In 1972 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.The first retrospective was organized by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1982 he married again and moved to Long Island in 1984.
The force that drives Dennis Oppenheim onward in his relentless output of interventions and actions, ideas and forms, constructions and explorations is energy that is never quenched and never gives way to inertia. He is producing an amazing imaginative power that transforms the territory and boundaries of art. Oppenheim´s art forms an enormous archipelago of points of interests. What matters is not the individual island of painting or sculpture, performance or film but the traffic and network of events, forces and figurations established in the creative process that holds the whole system together.
His entire artistic adventure between 1967 and 2000 is marked by a conduct that is neither repetitive nor straightforward, like a fluid pattern that is continually developing from life. In this sense, Oppenheim´s work is neither controlable nor classable.
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