Catherine Opie

For the Blood grids, Opie photographed every single representation of blood and bloody wounds depicted in paintings and tapestries in the collection of the Vatican Museum, capturing these with meticulous close framing in situ, making visible the violent histories embedded within the Church. Opie has worked with blood as subject and medium since the early 90s, with works such as Self-Portrait / Cutting (1993) and Pervert (1994) borne out of the context of the AIDS epidemic. The Blood grids explore the grand narratives running through the power structures of the Church as communicated in its art, and ask how we can begin to find a new way of re-telling these stories that forever proceed us. The framed images are presented in a modernist grid as her own taxonomy, but an adaptable and ever moving one. Arranged in aesthetic choices by Opie, hands and feet guide the eye through the grid; every once in a while a detail is repeated, but closer up. Each component part is purposefully separate rather than a composite print: anybody could choose a different system, a different story, if they want to.

The Blood grids are part of a wider body of work Walls, Windows and Blood, conceived and developed on the artists American Academy at Rome Residency, and first exhibited at Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples.