Julian Opie

£4,150-£6,000 VALUE (EST.)

$7,500-$11,000 VALUE (EST.)

$7,000-$10,000 VALUE (EST.)

¥35,000-¥50,000 VALUE (EST.)

€4,750-€7,000 VALUE (EST.)

$40,000-$60,000 VALUE (EST.)

¥660,000-¥960,000 VALUE (EST.)

$5,000-$7,500 VALUE (EST.)

-8% AAGR

This estimate blends recent public auction records with our own private sale data and network demand.

Auction Date

Auction House

Artwork

Hammer Price

Return to Seller

Buyer Paid

November 2021

Christie's New York - United States

Detective - Signed Print

Meaning & Analysis

Detective is a signed digital print made by the acclaimed British artist Julian Opie in 2014. The print comes in an edition size of 50 and shows a man on the phone who appears to be walking across the composition. The man is wearing a white shirt and blue trousers, the badge attached to his belt suggests he is at work and the title of the print indicates that he is a detective.

read more about Walking In London

Detective is part of Opie’s Walking In London collection which features prints of different people from a wide variety of professions in transit, walking from one place to another during their working day. Opie does not capture these people at work, doing the interesting things the titles of the prints suggest they do. Instead, Opie chooses to depict these people when they are doing the most banal of activities, walking. Speaking about his representation of the ordinary and everyday, Opie explains: “mundane things are just as exciting as all the things you might imagine escaping into”.

The figure in Detective is rendered in Opie’s unique visual style, characterised by his use of simple forms, thick outlines and blocks of flat colour. Opie duplicates the man’s legs and blurs them which produces an illusion of movement and gives the impression the detective pictured here is in a rush.