Julian Opie has become one of the most renowned artists of the New British Sculpture movement and this collection resonates strongly with the artist’s personal life as Opie lives and works in London. Opie takes great inspiration from everyday and modern life, as seen in this collection and others by the artist such as the Walking In The Rain collection and The New York Couple collection.
The prints in the Walking In London collection are exemplary of Opie’s distinct visual language and artistic style. Opie’s works are often characterised by his use of simplified forms, often human figures, which are immediately recognisable due to the way in which he renders them using simple, thick black lines which he then fills with a plain, bold colour. The combination of thick lines and colour produces a one-dimensional effect, meaning his artworks often appear flat and lacking in depth.
As is commonplace with many of Opie’s depictions of people, the figures in Walking In London are rendered faceless. The lack of facial features contrasts interestingly with the colourful clothes they wear and the detail that Opie adds to produce the illusion of movement. As well as lacking detail, Opie’s deliberate technique and effort to render his figures in a flat style can be seen as a homage to Minimalism and Pop Art. Opie was influenced by Pop Artists Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. In particular, he was drawn to Lichtenstein’s comic book imagery and use of cartoon characters, as well as Warhol’s highly commercialised style of portraiture.
Opie’s prints are produced using a unique process in which the artist takes photos or short films of landscapes, cityscapes and people, and then digitally reduces them to pure surface and line. The artist adds bright colours to these works and exaggerates the outlines of the shapes he captures. This reduction is a means for Opie to question how images are perceived and understood by the viewer, and prompts the viewer of an Opie work to consider questions of form and abstraction.
Depictions of people walking often appear in Opie’s works. The artist explains why he was so drawn to figures in motion elaborating: ‘when you move, the world becomes more visible’ as the act of walking allows one to be transported from the isolation of a screen or a book into the outside world and wider communities.
