Kristin Oppenheim is an American artist best known for her immersive installations based in sound, film, and performance. Over the last three decades, she has composed vocal works not as a musician, but as a conceptual artist working with galleries and museums around the world. Oppenheim’s installations saturate space touching on fragmented memories that blur the lines between reality and abstraction. In spring 2021, she released a new vinyl record, “Night Run,” which features the first collection of her early sound works recorded in her studio between 1992 and 1995. The album is the inaugural release of the Berlin-based record label INFO, founded by interdisciplinary artist Reece Cox. In each recording, Oppenheim’s voice is the sole medium, forming repetitious phrases half-sung and half-spoken to compose disciplined but haunting environments that drift back and forth, panning across the stereo field. Her latest album, “Voices Fill My Head”, features the second collection of her early sound works from the 1990s and was released on June 9th, 2022, along with the opening of her solo exhibition, "She Had a Heavy Day," at greengrassi in London.

 

Oppenheim's recent exhibitions also include her solo show at 303 Gallery, New York, where she premiered her film installation, “Bang Bang,” (2022). Her work was also on view in the group exhibitions: "Breathing one's Breath," at Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles, France, (2021) “‘La Candelaria”, at  Museu de Valls, Tarragona, Spain, (2022) and "13 Women: Variation II" at the Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa, CA (2023). 

 

Kristin Oppenheim was born in 1959 in Honolulu, Hawaii. She received a BA from San Fransisco State University in 1984 and an MFA  from Hunter College in 1989. She lives and works in New York City, and is represented by greengrassi in London, and 303 Gallery in New York.

 

Oppenheim’s work is included in public collections of the Art Foundation Mallorca Collection; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the FRAC Des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou; MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; MAMCO Museum d’art Modern et Contemporain, Geneva; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; OCMA Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York.