Julian Opie

Four sculptures, installed at staggered intervals on concrete plinths, derive from Opie’s Busan Walkers series of 2023. Rendered in high-gloss auto paint on aluminum, each depicts a figure in motion – a passerby originally photographed on the Busan seafront and subsequently translated into a drawing, which in turn served as templates for a series of twenty statues. A simplified profile view of a body has been enlarged – given volumetric depth – and yet the image remains studiedly two-dimensional. 

Red phone. (2023) and Yellow phone. (2023) portray people walking while holding their mobile devices. At once inhabiting the physical world and the virtual space, the figures express a quality – pervasive in Opie’s art – of demonstrative gesture and self-containment. Sleek externality belies a sense of the sealed interior. The man in Black shorts. (2023) swings his arms as he walks; the young woman of Turquoise hair. (2023) adopts a more extravagant posture, flinging out one arm behind her to merge with her hair. 

In this way, Opie invests minor details, a transient stance or a piece of clothing, with emblematic force. In their dual flatness and heft, the Busan Walkers invoke a long history of free-standing and architectural sculpture, for instance classical Greek carvings that were originally designed to be viewed frontally, as adornments on buildings, and later reinterpreted as objects in the round; or the monumental bronze statuary of historical figures familiar in cities around the world, their stone plinths rendered here in the more urban language of cast concrete. Opie restates that tension between image and objecthood, conveying visual information through the barest essentials. 

He has eliminated practically all individualizing details from his figures. And yet, contrary to the standardized signage that constituted an early inspiration, a sense of ‘real life’ persists. It is discernible in three new animations on LED screens, also deriving from a larger group, in which he depicts lines of schoolchildren in continuous motion. The imagery shares the declarative linearity and flatness of his work in general – the children’s faces and clothes are neutral, differentiated by basic facts of hairstyle, height, or clothing (the anomaly of a baseball cap, the shape of a dress). 

These works mark a new development in that Opie hasn’t previously included children in his images of walking crowds, and while the animations are schematic – types who might almost have sprung from an instruction manual – they are also made individual. No two figures are alike. The cyclical movement, too, varies within each animation. As Opie has noted: “Each child walks at a slightly different speed, so the relationships between them change over time like four independent pendulums.”

In contrast to the monodirectional movement of the LED works, three paintings of children walking, made on gridded resin supports, show backward and forward positions. The image is hand painted and deeply engraved into the material, whose stone-like quality and monumental scale evokes imposing decorative friezes on the walls of ancient temples. The rhythm of the animations devolves into something more syncopated, suggestive of two-way motion. Each painting and animation depicts a particular year group: the artist began by making videos of classes in a school. Seen as a totality, the endlessly strolling children amass into a portrait of growing up.