Michelle Lopez

Michelle Lopez is an interdisciplinary sculptor and installation artist renowned for her conceptual practice and daringly experimental methods with both process and materials.

Biography of Michelle Lopez

Michelle Lopez was born in 1970. In 1992, she received her BA in literature and art history from Barnard College at Columbia University in New York. Later, she furthered her studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York, obtaining an MFA in Painting and Sculpture in 1994. 

Lopez initially garnered critical acclaim with her sculpture "Boy," a leather-clad Honda, which premiered in 2000 as a highlight of MoMA / PS1's Greater New York exhibition.

She received the NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship Grant in 2009 and was honored with the New York Foundation for the Arts Sculpture Fellowship in 2010. Her contributions were further recognized in 2019 with a Guggenheim fellowship in Fine Arts. Looking forward, in 2023, she secured a Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Exhibition Fellowship for her upcoming project "Pandemonium," slated to debut in 2025.

Michelle Lopez holds the position of Associate Professor of Sculpture within the Fine Arts Program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where she also leads the Sculpture Division, guiding students in their explorations. 

Her notable solo exhibitions include "Lasso Reprieve" at Commonwealth & Council in Los Angeles (2023), "Ballast & Barricades" at ICA in Philadelphia (2019), "House of Cards" at Simon Preston in New York (2018), "Chandelier" at Galerie Christophe Gaillard in Paris (2016), and many more. 

Currently, the artist works in New York and Philadelphia.

Michelle Lopez's Art Style

As a constructor, conceptualist, and manipulator of materials, Lopez ingeniously delves into cultural phenomena, pushing the boundaries of industrial processes that shape various facets of consumerism. With a discerning perspective, Lopez scrutinizes disintegrated political and social frameworks by subverting cultural conventions through her construction processes.

In her installations, Lopez meticulously crafts precarious compositions using humble yet labor-intensive materials like hand-twisted steel rope, stretched glass, curved wood, and urban debris. These creations are imbued with the aesthetic lexicons and narratives of industrialization, artistic movements, and architectural landscapes, serving as critiques of the influences of dominant narratives, power dynamics, and authority on spatial configurations.

By situating her work within the contexts of queer and feminist abstraction and conducting thorough material research, Lopez advocates for the intertwined formal and political implications inherent in contemporary sculptural endeavors.

Lopez has curated ambitious international exhibitions that offer immersive explorations of collapsed structures, both on micro (individual and figurative) and macro (political and social) scales. Through her work, she explores the phenomenon of violence, examining it through the lens of silence and disappearance.