JULIAN OPIE, LUC AND LUDIVINE GET MARRIED (PAIR 09), LUC AND LUDIVINE GET MARRIED, SIGNED MIXED MEDIA PRINT, EDITION OF 10, 2007
Engaging with the 19th century art historical tradition of silhouette portraiture, Luc And Ludivine Get Married (pair 09) is a work from Julian Opie’s Luc And Ludivine Get Married series from 2007. The images are produced from cut black and white paper laminated together, showing two portraits of a man and a woman in elliptical frames and blown domed glazing.
Since the mid-1990s, Opie has explored the principles of modular variation across artistic media and art historical genres. The artist’s Luc And Ludivine Get Married series is indicative of this investigation, with prints consisting of similar titles, each with the same double portrait format, and the pose of the two figures interchanged in each print. Opie emphasises art as a commodity in his replication of post-industrial modes of production and exposes the dehumanising effects of computer technology.
With Opie’s mechanical repetition of the portraits in the Luc And Ludivine Get Married series, each figure rendered in one of four poses, the meaning of each work is changed by the combination of poses presented. For instance, in Luc And Ludivine Get Married (pair 09), the figures seem more detached in comparison to Luc And Ludivine Get Married (pair 05) where they are facing one another. This series is indicative of Opie’s desire to work with one idea across a number of different compositions, producing many versions of the same subject.
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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.
