JULIAN OPIE, LUC AND LUDIVINE GET MARRIED (PAIR 16), LUC AND LUDIVINE GET MARRIED SERIES, SIGNED MIXED MEDIA PRINT, EDITION OF 10, 2007
Featuring two individual portraits of a man and a woman, Luc And Ludivine Get Married (pair 16) is a work from Julian Opie’s 2007 Luc And Ludivine Get Married series. Reminiscent of Victorian silhouette portraiture, this work shows the figures exclusively in black and white and presented in two elliptical frames.
Luc And Ludivine Get Married (pair 16) has the most obscure composition of the entire series, showing the figures facing away from the viewer to show only the back of their heads. In creating these portraits through ‘objective’ computer technologies and the visual language of graphic design, Opie forms a kind of ‘non’ style that disguises the artist’s hand. Much like the way in which the identity of the sitters is hidden by their facing away, Opie contains subjectivity within a depersonalised syntax of signs.
Opie toes the line between the visual language of graphic design and fine art with his use of bold lines, simplified shapes and flattened picture plane. The Luc And Ludivine Get Married series is unique in the artist’s oeuvre in the way that each portrait is presented in an oval frame with blown domed glazing. At the same time, the repetition of the same subject across an entire series, with small variants in each work, is very typical of Opie’s work since the mid-1990s.
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.
