Name: Nurse
Brand: Julian Opie
Rating: 5 (236 reviews)

Track auction value trend

Julian Opie's Nurse, a digital print from 2014, is estimated to be worth between £5,500 and £8,500. This artwork has shown consistent value growth, with an auction history of three sales since its entry to the market in June 2017. In the past five years, the hammer price has ranged from £3,500 in September 2021 to £4,134 in May 2023. This signed piece has an average annual growth rate of 3% and is part of a limited edition of 50.

Meaning & Analysis

Nurse is a signed digital print made by British artist Julian Opie in 2014. The print comes in an edition size of 50 and shows a woman wearing a white top and jeans. Set against a dark blue backdrop, the woman is captured walking across the composition. Opie duplicates the woman’s legs and blurs them which produces an illusion of movement, making this a dynamic print that experiments with how motion can be conveyed in images.

The figure in Nurse captures the essence of Opie’s unique visual style which is characterised by his use of simple figures and forms drawn using thick outlines which are then filled with blocks of flat colour. Opie’s style was heavily influenced by Minimalism and Pop Art, as well as the comic book imagery of Roy Lichtenstein and the bold outlines of Patrick Caulfield.

Nurse can be seen alongside a range of other prints in Opie’s Walking In London collection. Each print in this collection shows a figure, depicted from side-on, captured in motion, walking across the composition. None of the figures have faces which reinforces how these are ordinary people going about their daily lives. Indeed, the subjects depicted in Walking In London could be anyone which reflects Opie’s fascination with depicting everyday reality.