Julian Opie

De Brock presents Julian Opie’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, marking twenty-five years of creative collaboration. Spread across the gallery’s three spaces, the exhibition features figurative works from the artist’s Angel series, as well as new hand-painted portraits inspired by a recent trip to India.

A graduate of Goldsmiths in the early 1980s, where he studied under Sir Michael Craig Martin, Opie’s multidisciplinary practice remains rooted in drawing while repeatedly encompassing large-scale sculptural installations, architectural interventions, moving-image LED lightboxes and two-dimensional works accomplished through advanced print-making processes. Instantly identifiable for their simplified, stylistic depictions of everyday existence, Opie’s oeuvre has long engaged with the language of pictograms, from the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs to the emojis that punctuate current digital communication. His portraiture in particular, a practice initiated in the mid-1990’s following inspiration from the silhouetted symbols found on lavatory doors and road signage, merges the art historical canon of contrapposto-stanced, classical sculptures and staged, society genre paintings with contemporary street styles and digital method of making.

For his recent Angel series, Opie turned his attention once again to the figures and foot traffic of his hometown, London. Following repeated sessions of people watching and photographing passers-by on a busy North London high-street, a suite of forty striding strangers were selected and translated into his signature, universal style. Presented in naturalistic colour palettes but with a high-gloss mirrored finish, each retains the energy of the artist’s original street-side observations while being immediately elevated from ordinary individual to artistic subject. Where previously Opie’s distilled depictions have appeared self-contained, as if limited to the confines of their picture planes, here white backgrounds blend with white gallery walls as if to free the figures, giving each the illusory ability to amble around and explore the exhibition space.

Alongside, Opie exhibits for the first time large-scale, hand-painted portraits. Initiated by a fleet of faces captured on a recent trip to India, his front-on, floating heads are reduced to their purest physical form, practically symmetrical if not for their separate hair styles. Employing a limited, bold colour palette borrowed from vibrant Hindu iconography and the brightly painted facades of houses in Southern India, each emblematic outline is randomly allocated a three-colour combination, as the artist begins to entertain the possibilities of emerging AI technology to entirely outsource portrait production.

Resolutely representational, Opie’s unique approach to capturing the contemporary figure has resulted in recent institutional exhibitions at La Llotja (Palma, 2024), Galleri F15 (Norway, 2023), Mango Museum (Changsha, 2023), He Art Museum (Shenzen, 2022), Pitzhanger Manor (London, 2021), Berardo Museum (Lisbon, 2020), Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (Tokyo, 2019), Gerhardsen Gerner (Oslo, 2019) and The National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, 2018). Examples of the artist’s portraiture reside in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, Tate, British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum.

The opening reception will be held in presence of the artist on Saturday 18 April from 5 till 8 pm, please email us for more information.