Which artists influenced julian opie

Many of his collected works are on display in his east London converted warehouse studio. You never know what you need or will find, so I do learn a lot. There are many wonderful and striking works in Opie's collection, not least a bust of the 18th-century composer Christoph Gluck from the studio of Jean-Antoine Houdin in which you can see the terrible scarring effects of having had smallpox.

Opie was originally meant to fill just the one room but admitted getting slightly carried away, hence the LED sculpture of a peeing boy and an enamel-on- glass naked lady in the Holburne's gardens. Both are already attracting interest for photographs. Opie said the painting that got him started as a collector was an oval portrait from the studio of Godfrey Kneller.

He also is a keen collector of Manga and Japanese prints but he does admit some art blind spots, chiefly the 19th century. This article is more than 7 years old. I find this interesting and it helps in my attempt to make these images feel like familiar, museum portrait paintings.

As well as traditional portraits where the sitter is shown looking out of the canvas, Opie has also produced a series of depictions of people walking in profile. For Walking in Melbourne , Opie asked a local photographer to photograph people across the city, from the busy shopping street to the beach boardwalk. He then drew from these photographs, transforming the people into characters by reducing them to their defining features and freezing their movements on paper.

Not all of his works remain stationary, however. To create the work, Opie filmed a model walking on a treadmill and translated the film into his signature style, drawing each individual frame to create an animation. Opie then converted these drawings into a film which is shown on an LED display, of the kind that is normally used for billboards and information panels. Opie is also interested in landscape and how it too can be reduced to a handful of lines or shades of colour.

In his Imagine You Are … series for example, he begins with photographs and digitally transforms the images, turning them into dramatically stark hand cut stencils.

Each work in the series features an empty road, simplified to the level of a cartoon or video game background, which is flanked by greenery and appears to be leading the viewer to a future of blue skies, echoing tropes of road trip films and travel photography as well as racing games. He has also produced a series of reclining nudes — male and female — and images of nude women holding yoga poses.

As well as winning a prestigious award, the cover propelled Opie to international fame and cemented his reputation as an artist who constantly pushed the boundaries of his practice and the tradition of portraiture. At the same time, Opie had turned his work into a commodity, allowing it to be reproduced countless times as a product that could be bought and sold for very little compared to his editioned and unique artworks. Within such a framework, art is less a noun and functions more like a verb.

While there was no specific characteristic style to link these artists together, the group indeed worked with ordinary and conventional materials grounded in everyday life. At the time, Opie was making loosely painted metal sculptures that combined humour and wit with a realistic mode of depicting objects and images drawn from the observed world.

These works shared a visual and material resemblance to the early work of Jeff Koons and even Haim Steinbach as they drew equally on the legacy of Minimalism and contemporary forms of commercial display to produce a critique of the commodity and postmodern forms of consumption. The aim of such an approach is to produce an art this is not — to paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard — the reflection of reality, but to make art that foregrounds the reality of a reflection. In many respects, Opie has remained fundamentally concerned with exploring how reality is always already re-presented to us through the authoritative sign, be it a contemporary road sign or a LED announcement in an airport or along a motorway, or alternatively that grounded in an historical image and object in the antique portrait or bust.

All drawing is, in a sense, a process of applying language to an image. Each step made in the process of producing a work comes forward and operates as a kind of drawing in itself and each layer takes the subject closer towards something you can see.

Some steps in this extended process are simple to describe, like the earliest moments derived from the framing and recording device of a photograph. These images are then imported onto a computer screen. Further stages are far more complex and instinctive. Opie applies a kind of translation of the photographed figure into a language he has developed based on signs and symbols, shadows and outlines.

A single line of concentration and focus so that your hand moves with your eye as it understands an object. Next comes a stage of colouring in and collage, of trial and error as different elements are highlighted or dumped. I am always aiming for the minimum that tells the maximum. Opie takes his inspiration from the Tintin cartoons by Herge. Julian Opie is one of the leading contemporary artists in the world. His work is exhibited extensively in galleries and museums around the world.

Looks like ill start to read tinitin books again hehe. Absolutely superb! I studied him for my art degree and it has stuck with me ever since Reply. Looks like ill start to read tinitin books again hehe Reply. We use our own and third party cookies to improve your experience and our services; and to analyze your use of our website.