Deborah Oropallo’s photomontages juxtapose studio photography with found images from costume catalogues and military figures from historical paintings, a process in which seemingly disparate sources are layered into intricate compositions that explore tensions between gender, power and representation. The source material for Diver is from Portrait of Anna du Pire as Granida (1660) by Bartholomeus van der Helst.

Deborah Oropallo's work is included in the permanent collections of multiple institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, MoMA, and the Anderson Collection at Stanford University. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Boise Art Museum, Montalvo Gallery, and the San Jose Museum of Art, and has also been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Biennial, SFMOMA, the Corcoran Gallery Biennial, and the Jewish Musuem. Oropallo is also a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, the Engelhard Award and a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.