Catherine Opie has shows at both of Lehmann Maupin’s New York spaces — in Chelsea on 22nd Street, and on the Lower East Side at Chrystie Street. I kind of unexpectedly flipped for the one at the Chrystie Street location, with photos documenting Elizabeth Taylor’s home at 700 Nimes Road, near Beverly Hills, taken between 2010 and 2011. I say unexpectedly because although I anticipated that they’d be, like Opie’s portraits, gorgeous — they are — but I hadn’t anticipated how much I’d read from them. I don’t know much about Elizabeth Taylor or her movies; the films I like largely displaced her generation, starting in the 1960s and ’70s. I know she was glamorous and was connected somehow to Richard Burton and to Michael Jackson. Nonetheless, I find Opie’s intimate vignettes of Taylor’s opulent home and possessions, really revealing about who the actress was. That might be an illusion, but god, it’s a pretty one, and with diamonds, too.
“Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road” at Lehmann Maupin, 201 Chrystie, through February 20, and “Catherine Opie: Portraits and Landscapes” at Lehmann Maupin, 536 W 22nd, through March 5; 212 255 2924.
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