JULIAN OPIE, YELLOW GREEN WHITE BLACK, STANDING PEOPLE SERIES, SIGNED LENTICULAR PRINT, EDITION OF 25, 2020
Taken from Julian Opie’s Standing People series, Yellow Green White Black is a print from 2020 that shows four full-length figures standing in a row. Yellow Green White Black shows a typical scene of modern life, with the figures dressed casually and standing as though waiting for a bus. Set against a bright orange backdrop and without a contextual background, Opie makes this print universal.
Yellow Green White Black is representative of Opie’s fascination with the human body and the genre of portraiture. The series as a whole explores various colour combinations and shows different figures in each print, repeating the same composition multiple times. In this work, Opie shows the figures standing casually, holding their bags and jackets, each shown in full-length and facing outwards.
Typical of many of Opie’s works, Yellow Green White Black is rendered with the absolute minimum by which a person can be represented. Reduced to simplified shapes and bold lines, the images show the figures with blank circles for heads and without feet. Opie is interesting in depicting people as a means to represent the mundanities of modern life and explore what it is to be human.
Read more about the Standing People series 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.
