Julian Opie: Biography & Artwork

Julian
Opie

As part of the trailblazing New British Sculpture movement, Opie helped put British art on the map in the 80s, fusing Pop Art’s two-dimensionality and a minimalist approach to sculpture. Today, Opie’s pared-back style is applied in various media and his works are collected by major institutions.

Biography

The highly stylised blend of Pop Art and minimalism of British artist Julian Opie’s art has made him a key player in British contemporary art and a trailblazer in the New British Sculpture movement. The minimal style of his digital artworks is synonymous with the ‘Cool Britannia’ scene of the 1990s and 2000s. Today, Opie’s history of works includes paintings, prints, sculptures, LED lights and more.

An early biography about Opie sees him live an ordinary childhood, despite his economist father making regular appearances on BBC’s The Money Show. Born in London in 1958, Julian Opie grew up in Oxford, where he became fascinated with art and antiquities in the Ashmolean Museum. He soon discovered his love for drawing and making art, seeing his practice as 'a diary, a way of dealing with the world. Otherwise, I feel you’re locked here, behind your eyes.'

Opie’s subject matter ranges from the average unsuspecting civilian to Hollywood celebrities and touches on portraiture, images of landscapes, cityscapes and even wildlife images. Opie’s art explores these subjects through his instantly recognisable reductive approach. His images of people, for instance, are as much influenced by traditional portraits as they are by the universality of toilet signs.

The success of Opie’s work on the 2000 album cover for English rock band Blur propelled him to international fame. Opie’s works later expanded to create portraits of very prominent figures and patrons, including inventor James Dyson, Formula One driver Jacques Villeneuve and rock star Bryan Adams.

Out of all his works, however, it is his walking figures have become one of his most famous works and a central motif. In particular, Opie’s iconic Walking Figures sculptures have become a sensation and were exhibited at the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisberg, Germany. Another notable series from Opie’s artworks is his 2005 This is Shahnoza, where the pole dancer Shahnoza takes centre stage. Using his iconic motif, he transforms Shahnoza into nine monumental works portraying the dancer in various poses. Opie’s work was featured in the 2008 exhibition This is Shahnoza in 3 Parts at Alan Cristea Gallery.

In 1982, Opie graduated from Goldsmiths School of Art in London, where he created a series called Eat Dirt, Art History involving copying famous artworks, acting as a comment on the 'hopeless position of the art student in light of art history' as well as a 'rallying call not to feel overwhelmed by it.'
Opie’s tutor at Goldsmiths, the conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin, heavily influenced Opie’s understanding of art and representation. Opie explored these interests through a reductive approach: his images of people were as much influenced by traditional portraits as they were by the universality of toilet signs.
Opie takes inspiration from sources as varied as billboards, classical portraiture, Japanese woodblock prints, Tintin comics, Egyptian hieroglyphs and road signs; turning to a vast array of media and technologies to connect the visual language of modern life with art history.
Much of Opie's work, like his series Japanese Landscapes (2009), is indicative of the artist’s extensive knowledge of Japanese art, taking inspiration from the woodblock prints of the Ukiyo-e school. Opie consciously reflects the work of Utagawa Hiroshige and Kitagawa Utamaro, identifying that this aesthetic holds a sense of stripped-down flatness and lends itself to reproduction. The work of the Ukiyo-e school shows an apparent simplicity that is attained from underlying complexity, something that governs Opie's style.
His simplified forms are iconic for their thick black lines, which are filled with solid, flat colour. This can also be read as an homage to both Minimalism and Pop Art. Opie draws particular influence from Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoon and comic book imagery, Andy Warhol’s commercialised style of portraiture as well as Patrick Caulfield’s bold outlined style.

Opie has often used pedestrians as his models, and Walking in Sadang-Dong in the Rain is a perfect example of why. The crowded composition is offset by the fact that these people don’t seem to look at or even acknowledge each other - they allow for the artist to stare and visually record without any performativity. We can also see here Opie’s working technique, which involves simplifying photographs into their most basic elements, while retaining a level of individuality in each figure - just as we see in the different outfits and umbrellas held by the people here. Sold for £160,750 at the Seoul auction on March 23rd 2021, this painting epitomises Opie’s fascination with the balance between individuality and universality.