JULIAN OPIE, TOURIST WITH BLOUSE, TOURISTS SERIES, SIGNED SCREEN PRINT, EDITION OF 20, 2014
Taken from Julian Opie’s Tourists series from 2014, Tourist With Blouse is a print that shows a three-quarter length portrait of a woman with her head down looking at her phone. The image is rendered in very thick, bold outlines and blocks of bright colour that is representative of Opie’s graphic style.
Opie’s Tourist series shows various people on the streets of London in colourful clothes and with no facial details, yet each appears as a distinct individual with personality. Tourist with Blouse conveys the idea of a young woman in a city she doesn’t know, looking intently at her phone to figure out where to go next. This portrait is instantly recognisable, an archetypal image of a young person in London, but at the same time represents a distinct portrait of an individual.
Tourist With Blouse plays into ideas that interest Opie around the sitter refusing the viewers gaze, something that one experiences when wandering the streets of a city. The notion of the sitter refusing to have their portrait created injects the print with a melancholic drama that wouldn’t otherwise be felt if the sitter’s face was seen. This sense of melancholy is further emphasised by the sitter’s barely-there facial features, distinguished only by his sunglasses.
Read more about Tourists 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.
