Julian Opie

The Alan Cristea Gallery is holding an exhibition of new prints and multiple objects by the acclaimed British artist, Julian Opie.

Opie's first suite of screenprints, published in 1998, cover the most important elements of this vocabulary. The road, the cars, the trees, the buildings, the cityscapes and the portrait all appear in this series of prints on which the artist worked with Bob Saich in Advanced Graphics.

The new series, entitled 'Eight Landscapes' has just been published. Using photographic images as the source, Opie has meticulously created a variety of more complex land and cityscapes. Ranging from a rain-swept London street scene to a panoramic Alpine vista, each one represents a new direction in the artist's work.

Over recent years Julian Opie has created his own comprehensive vocabulary of images. These 'virtual reality' subjects reflect the symbols which have become so familiar in our computer age and have been painted directly on the walls of galleries and museums, they have been depicted on canvas and have appeared in the form of free standing sculptural objects. Until this year they have never appeared in the editioned form to which they seem so well suited.

The Alan Cristea Gallery has published a series of six screenprints which cover the most important elements of this vocabulary. The road, the cars, the trees, the building, the cityscapes and the portrait all appear in the series of prints on which the artist worked with Bob Saich at Advanced Graphics. The images appear deceptively simple, but in fact required as many as fifteen screens per image in order to achieve the desired density and weight of apparently flat colours.

During the course of 1998 Julian Opie has taken part in exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Seoul and New York. He was one of the British representatives in the Sydney Biennale and was included in 'Surfacing' at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. In 1994 Julian Opie had a one man show at the Hayward Gallery in London. His works are represented in number of public collections including the Tate Gallery, London and the Stedelijk, Amsterdam.