Julian Opie

Krakow Witkin Gallery is pleased to announce the 7th solo exhibition of British artist Julian Opie. Below is the artist’s statement about his latest works:

I have spent a lot of time looking at portraiture in the widest sense of the word; the depiction of humans by humans. People have been drawing and sculpting each other since Neolithic times, it was mostly animals that were depicted before that.

I look at these images and then those of early civilizations, through to more recent Old Master portraits and on to the signs and symbols and art works of today. Inevitably a human image acts to some degree as a mirror and also a personal introduction. The interest and fear, attraction and repulsion we feel for others, known and strangers, is carried and evoked by images. I note in particular the difference between looking at a human who knows they are being looked at, at someone who looks back at you, and the very different experience of simply “people watching” as you notice and check out passers by, people seen from your car or in the park.

The earliest, personalized face-on portraits that I’m aware of are the amazing Roman period Egyptian “Fayum” portraits in wax, but images of marching or walking, dancing, working and hunting people date much further back. Think of the striding Assyrian soldiers on palace walls or the walking Egyptian courtiers bringing gifts to the gods, the hunting stick figures with round heads and flying limbs and spears engraved on the rocks in the Sahara desert. They all denote energy and movement of people and passing time. I sometimes see children mimic the walk in my artworks and hope this suggests that the image resonates not just in your eyes but also in your body. In this show I have kept strictly to the theme of passing, walking people, images of whom I have gathered from pavements around the world with a hidden camera and a long lens.

I have allowed myself only one work from each different series, always using an entirely different medium and technique, in the hope that this might shift the focus away from just the imagery. The way of making an image is as telling and evocative as the subject matter depicted, a combination similar to that of music and words in a song. Just as I don’t invent the people I draw, I don’t invent the systems with which I draw, or take them for granted as artist’s tools. They are gathered from the world, present and past. A digital film on a TV screen as seen in a shopping mall, the small square stones of a Roman mosaic, the shiny beads decorating a baby carrier of the Dayak people of the highlands of Borneo. I try to find the right balance and perfect combination for each visual technique of bringing an image out of the mind and into the shared physical world.

—Julian Opie, 2024.