Julian Opie

© Photo credit：Tony Metaxas

© Photo credit：Tony Metaxas

Julian Opie uses LED technology more commonly associated with digital clocks or motorway messaging displayed in cities, to form life-size panels, featuring electronic "stick figures" walking randomly in both directions. These panels are shown in different venues of the Expo Boulevard and reflect in a virtual way the pedestrians walking along this main alley. Opie's people explore the tension between general and specific reality and he uses his own line drawings of real people to create the images. His portraits transform individual subjects into universal signs, questioning the genre of portraiture itself, extended into moving animations. The animated figures walk, smile or dance with the fluidity of movement of real humans. Their movements are hypnotic, creating in the viewer a heightened sense of his own physical presence. The artist is interested in reality, not as a photographic record of a past moment, but as a full reality of reference, memory, sensory experience and representation. Julian Opie is thus celebrating humankind, the city dweller, in an attractive and colorful way.

Julian Opie

Born in 1958 in London, UK.
Lives and works in London.

Julian Opie cleverly uses computers in his art of portraiture. Opie's way of representing the human figure was inspired by traffic signs, by signage, by schematic representations. He was described as a "painter of modern life", a life in which the real and the virtual, the artificial and the authentic, feelings and logos are all mixed.

Recent solo shows:
2010: IVAM, Valencia, Spain; Gallery Mario Sequeira, Braga, Portugal; Gallerist, Istanbul, Turkey. 2009: Valentina Bonomo, Rome, Italy; Dancing in Kivik, Kivik Art Centre, Osterlen, Sweden; Kukje Gallery, Seoul, Korea; Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, India; SCAI the Bathhouse, Tokyo, Japan; Patrick de Brock, Knokke, Belgium. 2008: MAK, Vienna, Austria; Lisson Gallery, London; Alan Cristea Gallery, London; Krobath Wimmer, Vienna, Austria; Art Tower Mito, Japan. 2007: Barbara Thumm, Berlin; Museum Kampa, Prague; Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, Michigan (USA); King’s Lynn art centre, Norfolk, UK.