Versatile and yet distinctive / Julian Opie

Julian Opie is a painter, sculptor and video artist. The London-born artist became known in the mid-1980s with metal sculptures made of painted everyday objects. He draws his inspiration from the world of comics and consumerism, Japanese mangas and woodcuts as well as classical portraits and sculptures. Opie’s motifs range from nudes and portraits to figure paintings and landscapes. The works of the internationally successful artist are reminiscent of pictograms. Julian Opie explores the boundaries of stylization: To what extent can a person’s facial features be simplified while preserving their individuality? The artist has created his own universal visual language, which gives the motif an enormous variety of expression with minimal means.

Pop art is an important element in Julian Opie’s work. The American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97) brought cartoons and comic images into the realm of high art. Another American Pop artist, Andy Warhol (1928-87), pioneered standardized or industrialized portraits (with different colored versions of the same image) in the 1960s with his silkscreen portraits of stars. At the same time, British Pop artist Patrick Caulfield (b. 1936) began painting objects as pure blocks of color outlined in black. Julian Opie’s most famous portraits show the four members of the pop group “Blur”, Damon Albarn, Dave Rowntree, Alex James and Graham Coxon. They were used for the cover of the album blur: the best of, released in 2000, and appeared worldwide on billboards, posters, mugs, T-shirts and compact disks. The commercialization of these images and their simultaneous classification as high art have made visible a contemporary intersection between artistic expression and the commercialization of the advertising industry.

Julian Opie has emphasized this aspect of his work by presenting it in catalogs in the form of sales brochures that illustrate and list variable formats and prices for a range of sculptures and prints produced in different versions and combinations. By applying this process of commercial commodification to his work, Julian Opie seems to be aiming to please the viewer and satisfy all possible tastes. He said: ‘I think my work is about trying to be happy… I want the world to seem like a place you want to retreat to. (Quoted in Julian Opie 2001, pp. 4 and 8.) In the field of portraiture, additional questions arise about the minimum amount of essential information a picture needs to portray a person. The titles of the portraits usually consist of a first name combined with a word indicating the figure’s profession or occupation. This suggests that Julian Opie is examining both visual and verbal labels and questioning the nature of the information they are able to convey, how much ‘human truth’ they may or may not reveal and what is left for the viewer to fill in for themselves. The dehumanizing effects of extreme digital simplification on the human face are made clear by the empty, expressionless appearance of the portraits.