Julian Opie, Manga boy, 2014. Vinyl on wooden stretcher. 218 x 113 x 3.5 cm. Courtesy Krobath Wien I Berlin
There are some things in this world that are icons of Britishness. For example: a bacon and white bread sandwich, a cuppa, rain, indie music, forming queues for basically anything, moaning about the weather. Here’s one more: that beacon of British contemporary art, Julian Opie.
During this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin, Galerie Krobath brought a little bit of Britain to the white gallery wall spaces of Berlin with Opie’s current eponymous exhibition, showing images that take inspiration from towns and countries all over the world, including his home town. One of the most significant artists of his generation, Opie’s work is an expression of both minimal and pop-art, creating images that are simplified in tones and detailing, but are loaded with social context, becoming defining aesthetics of their generation.
Here, Sleek speaks to Julian Opie about similarities between his most recent work and video games, and why he’ll never make an app.
Did you have any relationship to the people in these portraits or are they just strangers on the street? And how did you choose them?
This is a fairly new project, which started in London about a year and a half ago, and took over from previous projects where I would have models in the studio – friends, acquaintances, sometimes people who wanted their portraits done. But it occurred to me, while out on the street looking at people, that there was a huge palette of much more interesting-looking people.
I tend to photograph from a long way off to avoid distortion and to avoid foreshortening, so people generally don’t know they’re being photographed. Every now and again, in the midst of a thousand photos you get someone who has noticed they are being photographed. In London, people aren’t particularly fazed: there’s a lot of architectural students, art students and tourists out there taking photos.
I did find in Seoul, that people don’t like it so much. I noticed a lot of people covered their faces or put a newspaper up, which I entirely respect and I just flick through those photos.
Renoir, Manet and L.S. Lowry have painted people on the streets, so there’s a long tradition of it, but for me there is a sort of realism, a naturalism, and a quirkiness to it. It’s like you’re taking in information instead of making assumptions. I like that sense that you’re not judging reality, you’re just taking it in like a mirror.
I have done the same project in London, twice, around the city area, which was mostly business people wearing suits and by the river where there are many more tourists. I did the same project in Mumbai, where people are wearing saris and flip flops. Each time I find the colours are very different: what people are wearing and their skin, that reflects in the background colours I choose – I find it interesting that places have a colour.
Your images are quite reduced. Do you think that you can reduce people to a sort of brand by stripping them down to these simple elements?
I don’t have any solution or firmly held opinion. I like to play with it, where things lie and how things can work. Roadsigns were where I started: a kind of public imagery and way of understanding the world that I could use.
Computer games enable us to enter a reality very similar to our own – you can move Lara Croft through different Tomb Raider rooms in the same way that we move. We deal with the world because we’ve learnt it like a computer game. We use references and information we’ve gathered from other places. You couldn’t do that with just raw information, you need this complex structure. Actually, what I am trying to do is see the world in that language base, that is perhaps closer to an overall reality, not like a photograph.
I don’t find photographs that realistic – they simply flatten out the light accidents that exist. Reality has different areas of importance. People often mention minimalism or simplification, but I don’t see it like that. The works I make are really quite complicated, if you think you are starting with nothing and trying to slowly build up a bit of colour, a bit of material, a bit of the presence of a person, there is actually quite a lot going on. If I put seven of these people together, as I did in Korea, then that’s about as complicated as I’ve ever got. For me, it’s an aim, to see if I can build up these logics to a kind of complex finale in a way.
Your work seems to come over quite well online, due to its vector graphic look, but when I came here and saw the work it was like an explosion compared to what I saw on screen.
I was recently asked to make an app, and I declined that. I don’t like the idea that I don’t even know what the shape of the phone is – or maybe its an iPad or something else. I’m very particular about the exact object , about how high it’s hung, about the type of screen it is on. There is no way in which a picture on your phone is the same as a plastic object on the wall, these are two very different things. You respond very differently to a lion jumping out of a forest at you than you do to a picture of a lion jumping out of a forest at you. You can try and tell yourself that a 3D film is real, but you’re not sweating with fear, which you would be if you were experiencing the monsters from “Avatar” attacking you.
I do find that sometimes people have a romanticism about art. They lead their whole lives through their phone and their laptop, but when it comes to art, they want it to be hacked wood and spilt paint. I love hacked wood and spilt paint but I think it’s limiting to feel that art needs to stay in that realm, while the rest of the world gets on with the most convenient and fun form of making and looking at things.
Exhibition View Krobath Berlin. Photo: Jens Ziehe
When you were hanging the works, were you thinking of the sense of movement in the gallery?
I’m quite good at spatial picturing. I think I can find my way back from a walk in the forest quite well and I know my way round the house in the dark. That helps me to picture what might work there.
I draw it as a map on a computer and send it to the gallery. But when I get there there are certain subtleties, like what you see when you come in the door or what your eye catches next, that you can’t predict. There’s an element of composition going on and part of that is making sense of the space. I try to creat a flow and something of a narrative, even if it’s a simple one of a crowd moving though the space. Each work should be seen to it’s best but the whole installation must also build into something more.
Julian Opie is showing at Galerie Krobath until July 12th, 2014