Julian Opie
Reduced people to a black outline and a dot for an eye, and put them on album covers and buildings.
Julian Opie was born in London in 1958 and studied at Goldsmiths under Michael Craig-Martin. After early painted steel sculptures he arrived in the 1990s at the reduction he has worked with since: a figure or a face pared down to a uniform black contour, flat colour and a dot for an eye, produced with computer assistance from photographs and output as vinyl on panel, LED, lenticular, animation and painted aluminium. The Blur portraits on the Best Of cover in 2000 made the manner nationally familiar, and the walking figures now appear on buildings and screens worldwide.
Medium is everything in this market and it is unusually varied: unique vinyl-on-panel works, LED and computer-animation works with their equipment, lenticular panels, painted aluminium sculpture, and editioned prints in runs from around thirty to several hundred. The same image across two media is two quite different values. Electronic works raise component-obsolescence questions and their maintenance history matters. Vinyl and lenticular surfaces cannot be repaired if scratched. Certificates and the studio's technical specification form part of every work.
If you own a work by Julian Opie
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