Julian Opie (born 1958) is an English contemporary artist whom currently uses computerised imagery for his art.
Minimalism and Pop art are two movements which can be associated with Opie’s work. Artwork which can be described as minimalistic is usually work which is stripped down to its most fundamental features. Pop Art, like Minimalism , borrowed from non- art conventions and languages, but did so by making images that were resolutely representational, pillaging mainstream visual culture, using imagery from the media and the work of other artists. Some pop artists such as Andy Warhol recognised that basic commodities could be treated as art.
Julian Opie’s earliest work were handmade sculptures as much as they were paintings. He would complicate this by consciously making sculptures out of ‘paintings’ or ‘paintings’ out of sculptures. He painted on materials such as steel to create compositions full of movement. He used steel because it was practical and versatile.
Opie’s work can be said to be derived from artists such as Patrick Caulfield and Michael Craig Martin. Caulfield was an English painter and printmaker known for his pop art canvases. He uses flat areas of simple colour surrounded by black outlines like some of Opie’s later work.
Changing to digital and installation, into the late 1980’s and early 90’s his work began to convey elements of early modernism. Modernism in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character or practice. The term encompasses the output of those who felt the ‘traditional’ forms of art were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of a growing industralised world. His work attempts to touch down in an everyday reality and think about urban environments, those fabricated places, or ‘non-places’ that are routine. His ‘imagine you are…’ se ries (see above) demonstrated how activities such as driving, walking and climbing could be represented by simple reductions. The work shown above is a vector drawing made by a computer program. He knocks out as much detail as he can but attempts to make it as realistic as possible. I think this is one of the main driving factors in his work.
I took a DVD from the library out on Julian Opie and took notes during it. This is my interpretation of what he was trying to tell the viewer. It helped me learn what his art is about.
-A lot of his usable material in his works comes from toys or models
-he feels, that for children the world is rescaled and redrawn, he makes it into a usable material due to its raw sense. This lets him know he can key into the audiences thoughts and understanding. A basic symbol carries a complexity of meanings, but the connection to childhood maintains a comforting sense of nostalgia.
-a notion to keep things realistic is a key factor in his work
-he feels the term realistic means something that tallies with your experience of the world, cannot be explained through a photograph
-he is intrigued by looking at everyday things and bringing it into his own language.
-he wants to recreate a sense of just ‘being’
-He realised he didn’t always have to make the things he was drawing. He could just use a box to draw on the side of which he did for such installations as ‘My Aunt’s Sheep’. This process lead him into drawing people.-In his portraiture, the human face is characterised by black outlines with flat areas of colour, and minimalised detail, to the extent that an eye can become just the black circle of the pupil, and sometimes a head is represented by a circle with a space where the neck would be.
-he feels his art is there to be looked at and not about reading into them or translating them into something else. They are there in their finished form.
-he puts out work that follows its own internal logic, not the normal ways that art is put out to the public (usually in galleries) so quite a lot of his work is public art.
-graveyards interest him as you find a world reflected in another material that has been created for the dead. Tombstones etc..
-he was asked to design the Blur:Best of CD cover in the minimalistic style above which some of you may be familiar with. This style is done on a computer and then printed on vinyl
