Julian Opie
From July 10 to September 23, 2019, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery presents “Julian Opie.”
This is Julian Opie’s first major solo museum exhibition in Japan in eleven years.
His previous show, held in 2008 at Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito, was the exhibition that sealed Opie’s popularity in Japan.
Julian Opie (b. 1958) is one of Britain’s leading artists, known for a body of work in which minimal visual vocabulary — dots and lines — animates figures and landscapes with striking vitality.
His materials extend beyond traditional painting and sculpture to include LED displays, signboards, and other industrial products we encounter in everyday life. This fresh visual language, drawn from ordinary materials, has won him a devoted following that crosses age, gender, and cultural background.
Opie rose to prominence on the European art scene in the 1980s. His work is held in major museum collections worldwide, making him an artist impossible to overlook in any account of contemporary art.
Synchronizing effortlessly with graphic design and pictograms, his two-dimensional works are brimming with a hybrid appeal that reaches far beyond the frame of painting. Opie is also known as a collector of Japanese ukiyo-e and anime cels, and their influence can be felt in his signature style with its emphatic contour lines.
In recent years, Opie has worked across a broad register — paintings and moving images depicting people traversing city streets, three-dimensional cityscapes and crows, pastoral scenes and sheep sculptures, joggers, and more. Composed around new works selected by the artist himself — including paintings, sculptures, and videos being unveiled for the first time in this exhibition — the show introduces the current Julian Opie.
In place of Opie’s earlier face-only portraits, his recent work more often depicts full-length figures viewed from the side. The crisp contour lines and clear, translucent color are unchanged, but the faces are now rendered as simple circles, pushing simplification and abbreviation still further.
The titles are equally pared down: a tattooed man becomes “Tattoo,” a woman walking in headphones becomes “Headphone,” a woman walking phone-in-hand becomes “Phone.” With both imagery and titles abstracted to their limits, the works can be said to embody a universal figure — the kind you might find on the streets of any city in the world.
In “Running 1” and “Running 2,” which use LEDs to render motion, the imagery is simplified even further. The figures scurrying frantically across the screen come to look slightly comic — perhaps a reflection of us, alive in this hurried modern age. The music heard drifting through the venue like BGM is likewise part of Opie’s work. Along with an installation boldly divided into two-dimensional and three-dimensional zones, please enjoy Julian Opie’s latest artistic world to the fullest.
Details
Julian Opie
Dates: Wed. July 10 – Mon. September 23, 2019
Venue: Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery
Hours: 11:00 – 19:00 (until 20:00 on Fri. and Sat.; last admission 30 minutes before closing)
Closed: Mondays (or the following Tuesday if a public holiday); August 4 (whole-building closed day)
Admission: General ¥1,200 (¥1,000) / University and high-school students ¥800 (¥600) / Junior high-school students and under free
* Admission also covers the concurrent exhibitions “Collection 067: The Work of Ryoji Ikeda” and “project N 76 Yukari Suematsu.”
Website: http://www.operacity.jp/ag/
