City?

This artwork featured in Synthetic Landscapes (2017). 

Julian Opie’s work is instantly recognisable and has been disseminated around the world. One of the most significant artists of his generation, his distinctive formal language is the result of digital alteration, presenting images as black outlines and simplified areas of colour; it speaks of Minimal and Pop art, of billboard signs and Japanese woodblock prints. Opie uses a variety of media and technologies, from animation and painted aluminium to sculptures of everyday features.

Amongst other subjects, landscapes have particularly benefited from his ‘programme of purification’. They are emptied out of unmemorable detail, stylised and systemised, to become an essence of themselves.

A scaled down and summarised version of a block of high-rise buildings stands as an anti-landscape, an alternative version of our world, apparently in conflict with the pastoral idyll. Yet city views, with their jagged skylines, smooth and shiny materiality have become just as desirable and valuable as classical magnificent vistas, at least to estate agents. A new idyllic landscape?

Image: Julian Opie, City? 2004. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.

 

About the artist

Julian Opie

Julian Opie exhibited in Synthetic Landscapes, Weston Park; Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, 2017.

Image: Julian Opie, City? 2004. For City Hall Park, New York City. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery.