OPIE, Julian (Londra, 1960)Julian Opie. Drawings 1982 to 1985

Printed by Journeyman Press. Design di Tamar Burchill

Julian Opie lives and works in London. He graduated from Goldsmith's School of Art in London in 1982. One of the most significant artists of his generation, his distinctive formal language is the result of digital alteration, with images such as black outlines and simplified areas of colour. Opie “paints” using a variety of media and technologies, from inkjet on canvas and painted aluminium to vinyl on walls and sculptures of everyday items: scale models of buildings, life-size cars, signs.

His purification programme has been applied to reproductions of paintings, telephone directories, books and portraits, where faces or bodies are abbreviated to striking likenesses. Rendered with digital technology, Opie's world is, in fact, a meditation on the complex interplay between nature and artifice, between sign and observed and experienced reality. The subjects are reworked by the artist, who arrives at the essence of form through a process of minimalisation of the sign.