Julian Opie, contemporary British artist celebrated for his unique style.
British artist Julian Opie was born in 1958 and graduated from Goldsmiths in 1982. Since then, he has focused on honing his highly distinctive minimalistic style, and he has successfully established his reputation as one of Britain’s foremost contemporary artists.
Opie’s work is most popular in the United Kingdom, however there is also a strong international demand for his art, which regularly fetches respectable prices. Prints dominate the artist’s market (accounting for 53% of his work sold at auction), and they tend to sell for between £1,000 and £5,000, with a significant number selling for up to £50,000.
Though Opie is undoubtedly successful, he’s intensely private, and very little is known about his personal life. Despite this, he speaks openly in interviews about his creative process, his artistic influences, and his outlook on life. Below are six things you might not have known about Julian Opie.
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He’s Interested In A Wide Range Of Artistic Movements
At art school, Julian Opie created a series called Eat Dirt Art History, in which he irreverently copied famous artworks in his own pen and ink style. He used the example of copying El Greco and writing “Eat Dirt El Greco” beneath the image, before pinning the drawings around the art school. Opie said: “it was an acknowledgement of the hopeless position of the art student in light of art history, but also a rally call not to feel overwhelmed by it.”
His engagement with art history and different artistic movements extends to the present day; he’s an avid collector of Japanese woodcuts, his work is clearly influenced by Pop Art greats such as Warhol and Lichtenstein, he’s experimented with “a 19th century invention of grooved lenses” to make lenticular prints, and he’s interested in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Opie fuses this with contemporary images such as public signage and advertisements to create his own unique style, resulting in sought-after prints such as Ika 4 and Sian Walking.
His Most Expensive Prints Sold For Over £117,000
New York Couples is a series of eight prints from 2019 rendered in Opie’s instantly recognisable style. Every print depicts two people walking in the streets of New York, though, despite what the title of the series implies, they are not in fact real-life couples. The two people in each print are merely strangers in the midst of a crowd, independent entities absorbed in their own worlds as they navigate the city. The complete series of eight prints was sold by SBI Art Auction in March 2022 for £117,738.
New York Couples sold by SBI Art Auction in 2022
He Was Inspired By Road Signs
Julian Opie’s style – usually involving figures with no necks, feet, or facial features – is invariably reminiscent of public signage giving information such as the location of lavatories and fire escapes, and it isn’t a casual coincidence. According to the artist, “road signs were where I started: a kind of public imagery and way of understanding the world that I could use.”
Opie reduces figures and scenes to their essentials, depicting only what is necessary in order to understand what is going on in the image. As he said, “there’s a lovely sign about taking the fire stairs. It has a zig-zag hieroglyph to show you the stairs and a stick person walking down and that’s all you need to know.” This reductive style is not to everyone’s taste, but it has made Opie a hugely popular contemporary artist; Woman Undressing 1, for instance, was sold by Grisebach in December 2023 for £42,859
He’s Created Lots Of Public Art
Opie was born in London and has lived in the city for the majority of his adult life, and his art is most popular in the United Kingdom. However, there’s also a strong international demand for his work; for instance, Ika 4 was sold in Munich and New York Couples was auctioned in Tokyo. Opie has also created a number of public artworks for different cities around the world, including animated LED displays in Phoenix, Seoul, and Dublin, which has helped to spread his fame around the globe.
Julian Opie LED Artwork in London
He Usually Works From Photographs
The majority of Julian Opie’s art is inspired by photographs that he’s taken, including New York Couples and Walking in London. As the artist said, “Renoir, Manet and L.S. Lowry have painted people on the streets, so there’s a long tradition of it, but for me there is a sort of realism, a naturalism, and a quirkiness to it.”
Opie flicks through the thousands of photographs he has, then he’ll “draw all the people who are drawable” and play around with the results. One of the things he enjoys about photography is that “you’re taking in information instead of making assumptions. I like that sense that you’re not judging reality, you’re just taking it in like a mirror.”
He’s Colour Blind
Although Opie uses a range of different tones and colours in his work, he is actually “really quite colour blind.” The artist said “it can be frustrating, but at the same time, it gives me a certain ability to play with colours. Maybe someone else would feel more overwhelmed, but I see less of a range.”
Considering this, it is interesting that many of Opie’s works (such as Woman Undressing 1) can be reduced to simple blocks of colour separated by bold, black lines. Sometimes, the artist says he tries to imagine “the people coming past me only in terms of a colour each. I think if you kind of phase out a little bit, you can do that.”
