Julian Opie

On the 19th of November Mário Sequeira Gallery opened a new and very important Julian Opie individual exhibition. This is the second time the gallery presents Julian Opie’s unique work and the gallery and the Artist selected a very important collection of some of the most representative works of Julian Opie’s recent production, which includes sculptures, paintings, installations, video works and the computerized animation. Julian Opie was born in London, in 1958 and studied at the Goldsmith’s School of Art, London, between 1978 and 1982. The Artist started exhibiting his work in 1982 and has since then presented countless individual exhibitions in Europe, in the US and in Asia. Julian Opie lives and works in London.

“There is a thoroughgoing realism which informs Julian Opie’s work. It is clearly evident not only in his subject matter, but also in his choice of materials and methods of production, the possibilities of meaning and engagement with the viewer – the latter particularly through a dynamic grasp of the contexts within which his works is shown. There is, overall, an aspiration to an aesthetic directness in Opie’s work, making it at once succinct and open, paradoxically hard-edged and personal. The positivism it exemplifies is as much philosophical as emotional. The happiness to which the artist refers is derived from the satisfaction of matching appearance and reality, making practical gestures which assert a faith in observable phenomena and positive facts. His realism is pragmatic, as opposed to a paralysing scepticism or a solipsism whereby no connection can be made between the work of art and whatever exists beyond.

Opie’s realism edits out inessential and unhelpful information – not as the result of some aestheticist Darwinian selection, but because it thereby makes space for the viewer to develop his or her own meaning. It makes the work more accessible.”

Pressetext

Julian Opie