Landscape Julian Opie

JULIAN OPIE, LANDSCAPE, SIGNED SCREEN PRINT, EDITION OF 78, 1995

Landscape is an early screen print by Julian Opie from 1995, showing a highly simplified landscape image of a green field, hills and a cloudy sky. Opie uses block colours to create the shapes for this image with a limited palette of only five colours.

Much like many of Opie’s prints throughout his entire career, Landscape is based on photographs that the artist later alters on a computer so as to create a stylised representation of the landscape. Drawing from immediate personal experience, Opie depersonalises the image with his slick visual language that encourages the viewer to reconsider how we look at the world.

Opie makes clear the way in which he wishes to offer these prints up as commodities to the viewer by creating multiple versions and possibilities for combination with the same subject. Landscape is part of a series of three prints that look almost identical, with small changes made to each such as the size of the clouds and placement of the winding river. Since the mid-1990s, Opie has explored the principles of modular variation across artistic media and subject matter and has himself described his work to be like ‘objects in an Ikea catalogue.’

ABOUT JULIAN OPIE

Known for his digital artworks and minimal style, British artist Julian Opie is constantly challenging traditional approaches to portraiture. Inspired by Pop Art as well as the visual language of modern life, Opie, who lives and works in London, has become one of the most successful and well known artists of the New British Sculpture movement. Opie’s process – which he applies to landscapes, still lifes and cityscapes as well as people – involves taking photographs or short films and reducing them to pure surface and line in order to question how images are perceived and understood by the viewer. Learn more about Julian Opie.