Julian Opie, Imagine you are driving a blue car, 2004, Imagine you are driving a yellow car, 2004, Installation view, Frieze, 2005. |
Julian Opie, Exploring and Interrogating Genres and Practices |
Julian Opie, Installation view, Art Gallery of Ontario, 2006.
Julian Opie, Bijou Gets Undressed, 2003, Installation view, K-21, Germany, 2003.
Julian Opie, My Aunt's Sheep, 1997, Installation view, Clissold Park, 1997. |
Ludivine, Writer, 2007.
Kirika, Art Student I, 2007.
Bryan Plays Guitar, City of Indianapolis, Organized by the Arts Council of Indianapolis, September 2006-September 2007.
Maria Teresa with Red Shawl, 2008.
Antonia with Yellow Shawl, 2008. |
Lisson Gallery This extensive show articulates Julian Opie’s interest in the traditional genres of landscape painting and portraiture, and his engagement with art history. Some 40 works will range in medium from painting and sculpture to liquid crystal display (LCD) screens and light emitting diodes (LEDs). He draws the contemporary world, constructing a refined, concise visual language, through which images of people, figures and landscapes are conjured. He distills images from the wide but everyday world we encounter, rendering them in his universally recognisable style. Simple signs and pictograms are expanded to evoke real people and places. Opie is interested in reality, not a photographic record of a past moment, but reality of reference, memory, sensory experience and representation. Opie’s portraits explore the tension between general and specific reality, transforming individual subjects into universal signs, interrogating portraiture itself. His new portrait works, such as Maria Teresa with red shawl (2008) and Antonia with evening dress (2008), are incredibly beautiful and rich in detail, and echo the repertoire of postures and poise found in 17th and 18th century British and Dutch portraits by Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Peter Lely. His interest in the human figure and portraiture has been further extended into moving animations. The animated figures walk, smile or dance with the fluidity of movement of real humans. Ann dancing (2007) is a huge brightly illuminated LED depicting a young woman’s stylish swaying dance motions. Her movements are hypnotic, creating in the viewer a heightened sense of their own physical presence. Also shown is Opie’s Eight Views of Japan (2007), a series of animations on double and triple LCD screens of Japanese landscapes based on a trip taken by the artist around Mount Fuji in Japan. These works reference Japanese art history, particularly "pictures of the floating world" — paintings and prints of the Ukiyo-e school. Opie has been much influenced by the graphic, pared down style of Utagawa Hiroshige and Kitagawa Utamaro, in whose work a seeming simplicity is attained from underlying complexity. Opie’s work, such as View of the mountains from the Nihon Alps Salada Road (2007), is influenced by Hiroshige’s spare, ideal compositions, which often play with perspective and cropping techniques to juxtapose a foreground motif with the background to dramatic effect. |
Julian Opie, View of Boats on Lake Montuso below Mount Fuji from Route 709, 2007. |
