Until August 24, 2025, Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean will present Monsieur Steichen, a captivating new exhibition by American artist Lisa Oppenheim. Through photographic, textile, and floral works, Oppenheim offers a poetic and unconventional portrait of Edward Steichen, the Luxembourg-born photographer who became one of the most influential visual artists of the 20th century.

Rather than a traditional retrospective, Monsieur Steichen is an artistic dialogue. Oppenheim delves into the lesser-known aspects of Steichen’s work—his lifelong passion for flowers, his textile designs, and his early experiments with colour photography. Describing her process as a response to Steichen’s “lost threads” and “discarded ideas,” she brings them back to life through a fusion of historical techniques and cutting-edge technology.

The exhibition opens with a striking photographic series that revives the now-extinct iris variety Monsieur Steichen, named after the artist by a French botanist in 1910. Oppenheim reimagines what this flower might have looked like by merging two vastly different image-making techniques: dye transfer printing, used by Steichen in the 1930s and 40s, and artificial intelligence, a defining force in today’s visual culture. The result is a speculative bloom that bridges the photographic past and the digital future.

A second body of work revisits Steichen’s 1926–27 textile designs for Stehli Silks’ Americana collection. Working with fashion designer Zoe Latta, Oppenheim created new fabrics based on unused motifs from Steichen’s archive, including floral patterns and an abstract photograph of gravel. These contemporary textiles are displayed on folding screens, each bearing the name and portrait of a woman central to Steichen’s life—his mother Marie and his three wives, Clara, Dana, and Joanna.

Other elements deepen the exhibition’s sense of creative excavation. The Steichen Studies (2024) give visitors insight into Oppenheim’s experimental approach, while a dynamic floral piece, Bouquet of Flowers (a photographic score), evolves over time, echoing the subtle colour variations found in Steichen’s own dye transfer works.

Outside the museum, in the moat, Oppenheim will plant Eduard’s Garden—a living installation of delphiniums in homage to Steichen’s celebrated flower exhibition at MoMA in 1936. Like the exhibition itself, the garden will evolve across the months, reaching full bloom in summer.

Curated by Christophe Gallois with assistance from Nathalie Lesure, Monsieur Steichen forms part of the 10th edition of the European Month of Photography in Luxembourg. Rather than offering a definitive view of Steichen, the exhibition highlights his openness to hybrid forms and experimentation, qualities mirrored in Oppenheim’s own practice.

“In this exhibition,” says Oppenheim, “I want to inhabit Steichen’s practice rather than examine a specific project. I hope to expand what it means to be a cultural producer, just as he did.” In doing so, she invites us to consider the image not as fixed memory, but as a site of endless transformation.