Julian opie brief biography of siren

Below are six things you might not have known about Julian Opie. Please use the form below to submit images of your print and receive a free, no-obligation valuation from a specialist auctioneer. We will also actively seek the highest offer from our network of private collectors to help you sell your print. At art school, Julian Opie created a series called Eat Dirt Art History , in which he irreverently copied famous artworks in his own pen and ink style.

Opie fuses this with contemporary images such as public signage and advertisements to create his own unique style, resulting in sought-after prints such as Ika 4 and Sian Walking. His work establishes a bridge between representation and abstraction, influencing artists globally as they explore the intersection of human perception and artistic depiction.

By simplifying complex landscapes and figures into essential forms, Opie has nurtured a visual language that resonates with a generation steeped in digital imagery and public signage. The integration of LED technology allows Opie to bring dynamic movement to public installations, which often serve as landmarks and gathering points. The New British Sculpture movement, with which he is associated alongside artists like Anish Kapoor and Tony Cragg, advocates for a more engaged and accessible form of sculpture — a mission Opie furthers through his public works.

His unique visual style has been celebrated in numerous exhibitions worldwide, ensuring his place as a significant figure in contemporary art. This appeal is reinforced through his wide-ranging use of mediums — from paintings to digital installations — that respond to changing technologies and viewer experiences. The critical and public reception of his work confirms the important role he plays in shaping modern visual culture.

Julian Opie remains a prominent figure in the contemporary art scene. His distinctive style, recognized for its minimal lines and basic colors, continues to make him a key figure in the world of modern art. Opie has stayed active by both displaying his work and producing new pieces. This is Monique. His artworks maintain relevance due to their engagement with everyday life and the way he challenges our perceptions.

Through his art, Opie invites viewers to contemplate on how we interpret and understand the world around us—how shapes, colors, and simplified forms convey complex narratives. Renowned for adapting his artwork for public installations as well, Opie continues to explore different canvases and settings for his work, from gallery walls to digital screens in urban landscapes.

He contributes consistently to the dialogue on how art interacts with public spaces and everyday life, asserting his influence on both the art world and the broader cultural context in which we live. Through his unique blend of minimalist aesthetics and digital innovation, Opie has redefined the boundaries of artistic expression in the modern era.

His ability to capture the essence of subjects with simplified yet evocative forms has made his work instantly recognizable and widely appreciated. Whether through his iconic portraits, dynamic landscapes, or engaging installations, Opie continues to inspire audiences and provoke thought about the evolving nature of art in a technologically driven world.

His use of contemporary materials and flat planes of color has become a hallmark of his style. Although Julian Opie emerged after the heyday of Pop Art, he has contributed to its legacy by incorporating everyday imagery and commercial aesthetics into his work. Says Opie, "In the 90s the computer was providing a rapidly growing public language that was fresh and new, and kind of thrilling.

I was seeing shop windows in [London's] Tottenham Court Road with all the computer screens with screensavers on them, and it was a real shock to seeing a moving, three-dimensional image that was a drawing. It simply hadn't been possible. It was an utterly new way of looking at things and yet, it obviously came from somewhere - it reminded you of Bauhaus drawing and Russian constructivism but it was still entirely new".

Commenting on the series for the Tate Gallery, Manchester observed that the works simulate not just "the symbolic landscape of computer games", but also, "children's picture books [that] encourages the viewer to journey into a stylized representation of the world, emptied of human presence". Opie himself said of the landscapes, "what I would really like to do is make a painting and then walk into it [and] I think my work is about trying to be happy I want the world to seem like the kind of place you'd want to escape into Mundane things are just as exciting as all the things you might imagine escaping into".

Manchester comments that Opie "suggests that the processes of his work may have an idealising or utopic function, which is belied by the blank emptiness of his imagery". However, his "visual symbols and his system of commodification suggest that the utopic ideals represented by these systems may result, paradoxically, in dehumanising alienation".

Opie has created a number of simple computer animations, some of which, including variations of Suzanne Walking , have then been transmitted as continuous loops on LED screens in public spaces, including the Northern Avenue Pedestrian Bridge in Boston, and Parnell Square in Dublin. In combining the iconic signage found throughout our public spaces, with imagery based on real individuals, these works explore the intersection between the artificial and the human.

While the works may seem unsophisticated, Opie's process for understanding and representing the figure's movement was rather intensive. He had his model walk on a treadmill at varying speeds, which he videotaped. Opie then imported the videos onto his computer, and selected certain frames that, when combined, would give the illusion of natural movement.

Finally, as with his portraits, he used each still image as a guide for his drawings. Through this process, he was able to capture the particularities of the individual model's gait. For instance, Suzanne's stride comes across as sensuous and feminine, while a complementary series, titled Julian Walking , shows a male figure whose movement is heavier and more cumbersome.

More recently, Opie has felt compelled to explore the nuances of human expression and movement. He says, "To be able to draw the subtle movements of the face, I had to find a new way of drawing. I looked at Japanese manga and old master paintings to understand how shadows instead of lines could be used for drawing. I used a 19th century invention with grooved lenses that gave the illusion of movement when you walked past a painting.

As with the classic haunted house paintings, whose eyes follow you, I can make my portraits respond to the viewer. It's a simple trick that doesn't fool anyone, but nevertheless breaks the rules of reality. Magic is an important part of art and allows the image to break out of normality and bring communication, language, to life". The "lenticular" printing method, as art historian Lucy Howie explains, involves the artist creating "a sequence of drawings, as if for animation, which are then layered on top of one another to create the illusion of movement when the viewer moves, and remain still when the viewer is still".

This work comes from a series of lenticular prints featuring Opie's own daughters. Indeed, many of his most creative and engaging works have developed out of his fascination with the way in which his children explore and observe the world. In this vein, he also created a number of Sheep sculptures, which were inspired by wooden animal toys that he brought back from Vienna once as a gift for his infant daughter.

He liked that the toys were both "images and objects", and he saw that his daughter had fun moving them around, as if the carpet of their home were a field. He then connected these animal objects to the human realm and made them into powder-coated aluminum sculptural works that could be installed inside or outside, in order to animate the spaces in which we exist.

Lenticular inkjet print on transparent synthetic polymer resin - National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. As part of his creative process, Opie often spends hours photographing passers-by in public spaces. After decades of keenly observing human behavior, he became interested by the idea of someone refusing to have their portrait taken, thus, as he puts it, "refusing your gaze".

He explores this idea in Lucia, Back 2 , believing that an image of someone "turning away" gives the viewer the feeling that they're behind this person in a queue. When compared to his commissioned, frontal portraits, the relationship between the viewer and the viewed changes significantly. Opie suggests that there is a sort of "melancholic drama" to this type of relationship.

He recognizes that throughout art history, there has been an ongoing presence of the acts of turning toward and turning away, as well as an exploration of what these movements mean for the relationship between viewer and viewed. He cites the example of a self-portrait by Sir Anthony van Dyck, which has a "strong twist in the pose". When confronted with the image of someone who is turning away, the viewer gets a stronger sense of being a voyeur.

Many works by Opie appear deceptively simple whereas the concept behind them is more complex. Says Opie, "I think I'm aware that when you make an image, a lot of what's going on there is to do with what people bring to it.

Julian opie brief biography of siren

Some people often talk about my portraiture being pared-down but I don't quite see it that way. I see it as starting from a point of view of saying, 'I'd like to make something, I'd like to mark my presence, I'd like to communicate what it feels like to look at things. If you take that as a given then I just try not to go any further than what I think I understand at any one time.

So, for me, the portraits that I make are quite complicated". Julian Opie was born in London, and raised in Oxford. His father was the renowned Australian-born economist, Roger Opie, who was an Oxford don and a regular guest on the British television program, The Money Show. His mother, Norma, was a teacher. Opie recalls, "They were comfortable, my parents.

They kind of stumbled through life". The Opie family owned a boat and he recalled: "My Father took navigation night school classes and avidly planned trips along the English South coast. We often sailed across the channel to France and Holland. It was a small rather slow boat, and we usually hugged the coast where possible, taking most of a day to get from one port to another.

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