Julian Opie (b. 1958, London, United Kingdom) has spent four decades reducing the human figure and the urban landscape to their essentials, thick black outlines, flat planes of color, a handful of telling details, in pursuit of an old question asked in a thoroughly contemporary way: what does it take for an image to read as a person?
Opie studied under the conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin at Goldsmiths in the early 1980s, graduating into the New British Sculpture movement alongside artists including Anish Kapoor and Tony Cragg. His earliest work consisted of painted steel sculptures exploring the relationship between vision and space; a 1994 fellowship at the British School at Rome coincided with his shift toward the portraits and figures for which he later became known, distilled from references as varied as Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, early Renaissance portraiture, and the anonymous vocabulary of road signs.
That reduction reached a wide public in 2000, when Opie's four-part portrait of the band Blur, faces rendered as a few dots and lines, became the cover of their album Best Of; the National Portrait Gallery later acquired the set. Opie extended the same economy into motion with his Walking Figures, anonymous pedestrians whose stride is animated on LED panels built, like a grid of pixels, from individual points of light, a technical constraint that gives the figures their faint, sign-like flicker. He has spoken of being drawn to the way a viewer can recognize an image as an obvious simulation while still experiencing it, somehow, as real, the tension at the center of the work, whether it appears as a gallery portrait, a public sculpture such as Shaida Walking, permanently installed on London's Carnaby Street, or a lenticular print.
Opie's work is held in the collections of Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Portrait Gallery, and his public commissions, walking figures rendered in steel, LED, or vinyl, now appear in cities from London to Seoul, carrying his reductive language into spaces no gallery could reach. He lives and works in London.
