Ruth With Cigarette 1 Julian Opie

JULIAN OPIE, RUTH WITH CIGARETTE 1, RUTH WITH CIGARETTE SERIES, SIGNED DIGITAL PRINT, EDITION OF 50, 2005

Ruth With Cigarette 1 is a print from Julian Opie’s Ruth With Cigarette series (2005) that shows a drastically pared-down portrait of the sitter, Ruth, an art collector living in Geneva. Opie shows the sitter with a floating blank circle as a head, and this image is rendered with thick bold lines, simplified shapes and flattened block colours.

The print is a half-length portrait of a woman who looks out to the viewer, cigarette in hand and her shirt open to show her underwear. Opie engages with the traditional art historical genre of portraiture through his use of pose and composition and with the fact that this is a commissioned portrait staged to show the sitter in a certain way. At the same time, Opie turns the art historical context on its head by using a photograph which is then digitally edited to produce a simplified pictogram that is decidedly modern.

Opie’s interest in finding a standardised version of the human form comes to the fore in his Ruth With Cigarette series. The faceless figures have no necks, and their hands are reduced down so far that smaller details like fingers are not visible in the portraits. These images are reminiscent of the signs found on lavatory doors and the sitter’s character is made distinguishable only through her pose and clothing.

Read more about Ruth 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.