Dennis Oppenheim was born in 1938 in Electric City, Washington. From 1966 until his death in 2011, he lived and worked in New York. During these four decades, Dennis Oppenheim’s art enlisted all available techniques and existing art forms – from writing, performance, video and photography to drawing, sculpture and installation. Oppenheim’s fascinating journey began with body art and land art in the epic mid-Sixties, arriving at a sarcastic and subversive commentary on contemporary life in the Eighties and Nineties, using toys – symbols of childhood innocence – and utilitarian objects that take on a new meaning in his hands. They build a soaring palace of subtle – and therefore all the more frightening – menace, which effectively undermines the joints and core of a prevalent, systemic consumerist complacency and a narcissistic individualism that sells illusions of security, prosperity and gratuitous pleasure. William Burroughs once said, with his unmistakable sarcasm: ‘No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.’ Oppenheim takes innocent signifiers of everyday life and twists them into meanings of death, sickness, horror – or simply agonising doubt. The dialectic relationship between form and content triggers a new conversation, charges with new meaning the signifier-signified relationship.