JULIAN OPIE, LUC AND LUDIVINE GET MARRIED (PAIR 06), LUC AND LUDIVINE GET MARRIED, SIGNED MIXED MEDIA PRINT, EDITION OF 10, 2007
Featuring two individual portraits of a man and a woman, Luc And Ludivine Get Married (pair 06) is a mixed media piece from Julian Opie’s 2007 series Luc And Ludivine Get Married. Presented in elliptical frames and blown domed glazing, the work is produced from cut black and white paper laminated together.
At first glance, these portraits are distinctly modern in their use of simplified and abstracted forms but Opie synthesises this with the composition and form inspired by 19th century silhouette portraiture. Throughout his artistic oeuvre Opie has taken inspiration from ancient Egyptian and Roman art, and Dutch and British painted portraits of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese prints, and the symbolic language of modern signage.
Opie shows the portraits of the both the male and female figures in profile, facing the same direction and turned to the right. Typical of many of Opie’s portraits, Luc And Ludivine Married (pair 06) is rendered with the absolute minimum by which a person can be represented. Reduced to black and white bold lines, the images show the figures with dots for eyes and simple lines for their mouth.
Read more about Luc And Ludivine Get Married by Julian Opie.
ABOUT JULIAN OPIE
British artist Julian Opie challenges traditional approaches to portraiture through his digitally designed and seemingly contradictory, depersonalised works. Working also with landscapes and cityscapes, Opie’s highly stylised work involves the reduction of photographs or short films into figurative reproductions created using computer software. The hallmarks of his artistic style are portraits and animated walking figures, rendered with minimal detail in black line drawing. Learn more about Julian Opie.
