JULIAN OPIE

Lisson Gallery presents an exhibition of new and recent works by Julian Opie, united by the theme of the walking figure. Encompassing sculptures, animations and paintings, these extend the artistic vocabulary that he has developed over four decades – “a language of forms, of images, of people.”

February 13 – April 19, 2025

Four sculptures, installed at staggered intervals on concrete plinths, derive from Opie’s Busan Walkers series of 2023. Rendered in high-gloss auto paint on aluminum, each depicts a figure in motion – a passerby originally photographed on the Busan seafront and subsequently translated into a drawing, which in turn served as templates for a series of twenty statues. A simplified profile view of a body has been enlarged – given volumetric depth – and yet the image remains studiedly two-dimensional. 

Red phone. (2023) and Yellow phone. (2023) portray people walking while holding their mobile devices. At once inhabiting the physical world and the virtual space, the figures express a quality – pervasive in Opie’s art – of demonstrative gesture and self-containment. Sleek externality belies a sense of the sealed interior. The man in Black shorts. (2023) swings his arms as he walks; the young woman of Turquoise hair. (2023) adopts a more extravagant posture, flinging out one arm behind her to merge with her hair. 

In this way, Opie invests minor details, a transient stance or a piece of clothing, with emblematic force. In their dual flatness and heft, the Busan Walkers invoke a long history of free-standing and architectural sculpture, for instance classical Greek carvings that were originally designed to be viewed frontally, as adornments on buildings, and later reinterpreted as objects in the round; or the monumental bronze statuary of historical figures familiar in cities around the world, their stone plinths rendered here in the more urban language of cast concrete. Opie restates that tension between image and objecthood, conveying visual information through the barest essentials. 

These works mark a new development in that Opie hasn’t previously included children in his images of walking crowds, and while the animations are schematic – types who might almost have sprung from an instruction manual – they are also made individual. No two figures are alike. The cyclical movement, too, varies within each animation. As Opie has noted: “Each child walks at a slightly different speed, so the relationships between them change over time like four independent pendulums.”