Julian Opie

Opie is an artist of contemporary life, using urban and rural landscapes, as well as moving figures, to bring time-honoured artistic genres into the twenty-first century. Working in a variety of media, Opie draws inspiration from both high art, design and the vernacular; lightbox advertising, billboard signs, Japanese Manga, seventeenth and eighteenth-century portraiture, nineteenth-century silhouettes, Roman busts and ancient Egyptian art.

A new edition of five screen-printed wooden skyscrapers, Modern Towers 1 – 3, 2017, which reference a series of works that Opie made in the 1990s, will be shown together with prints of office windows. Scenes of the Cornish coastline, including Gribbin Head, Lantic Bay and Polridmouth, have been printed digitally and mounted onto white acrylic blocks for new editions. Cornish Coast 1. and Cornish Coast 2., 2017, (pictured) are reminiscent of the kind of displays and signage you might find at an airport or on a high street.

For a new series of relief prints, Opie illustrates silhouettes of people walking around Melbourne, where he will have his first major solo museum exhibition in Australia in late 2018. These will be displayed together with hand-painted statuettes of walking figures, large screenprints of joggers entitled Runners., 2016, and further new editions.