Sarah Oppenheimer is an architectural manipulator. She creates apertures and extensions in buildings or walls, modifying familiar spaces with dramatic and disorientating interventions. Oppenheimer’s installations are made with meticulous precision and quality of finish – this contributes to the sense of permanence about her works – they never appear as transient installations but moreover as permanent challenges to our perception of our environment and ourselves within it. Her calculated excisions of prototyped building planes – walls, floors, and ceilings – challenge our understanding of architectural space. Oppenheimer’s work both disorients and clarifies our physical and perceptual experience of the architecture that surrounds us.
Oppenheimer’s projects and installations span the world including the UK, Europe, the USA and Australia. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland (2020); MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2019); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio (2017); the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida (2016); MUDAM: Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2016); and Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz, Switzerland (2014). She is a recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship (2011–12), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (2009), and Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2007). Oppenheimer is currently a senior critic at the Yale University School of Art. On August 28, 2021, Sarah Oppenheimer: Sensitive Machine, will open at the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College (USA). Her work is represented in important public collections and museums including the Perez Art Museum in Miami, the Baltimore Museum of Art, MUDAM in Luxembourg and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, amongst others.