ArtistBritishb.1958
Julian Opie
1 active items
The question Julian Opie keeps returning to is what the minimum amount of information is that you need to recognise a person. His figures have no pupils, no nose, no shading. They are, in terms of conventional draughtsmanship, almost nothing - and yet they are unmistakably people, often unmistakably specific people. That tension between reduction and recognition has driven his work for four decades.
Opie was born in London in 1958 and grew up in Oxford. He studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, graduating in 1982, where painter and conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin was a formative influence. His early work was sculptural: welded steel objects that resembled domestic appliances or architectural fragments, made with a deadpan humor that positioned them somewhere between object and image. By the late 1980s, painting had taken over, and by the mid-1990s his signature visual language - thick black outlines enclosing flat areas of solid colour - had crystallised.
The Blur commission in 2000 brought his work into mass visibility. Designed as the cover for the band's 'Best of' compilation, the four portraits of Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James, and Dave Rowntree reduced each face to five or six marks and still caught something recognisable in each of them. The design won the Music Week CADS award for Best Illustration in 2001. The reach of that image, across millions of album sleeves and posters, gave Opie a public profile few artists working in the gallery system ever achieve.
The walking figures series extended his logic into time. Works such as 'Shaida Walking' began with film footage of a model on a treadmill, which Opie then converted frame by frame into hand drawings in his style, before animating and displaying the sequence on LED screens. The result is a figure in perpetual motion - looping, weightless, stripped of everything except the fact of walking. Lenticular prints in the 'Walking in London' series use the same vocabulary but translate movement through the viewer's own shifting position relative to the print.
Public commissions have placed his work in contexts well beyond galleries. In 2006, he designed visuals for U2's Vertigo world tour; in 2008, he created set designs for choreographer Wayne McGregor's ballet Infra at the Royal Opera House. The LED sculpture 'Ann Dancing' (2007) became the first artwork installed on the Indianapolis Cultural Trail. His portraits of James Dyson and members of Blur are held by the National Portrait Gallery, London; more than two dozen works are in the Tate collection; and others are held by MoMA New York, the V&A, the Israel Museum, and the Essl Collection in Vienna.
At auction, Opie's works on the Nordic and international market appear primarily as prints and editions, with Phillips accounting for the largest share of sales in our database. The 10 works sold through Phillips reached top prices of GBP 18,060 for 'Lawyer, from Walking in London 1' and GBP 16,770 for 'Banker, from Walking in London 1'. Across 13 total items in the Auctionist database - including appearances at Stockholms Auktionsverk Malmö and Lyon and Turnbull - the prints category dominates. Globally, his auction record stands at USD 220,179 for 'Walking in Sadang-dong in the Rain', sold at Seoul Auction in 2021.