{"id":1095,"date":"2018-04-30T19:17:17","date_gmt":"2018-04-30T19:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/?p=1095"},"modified":"2018-04-30T19:17:17","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T19:17:17","slug":"wow-work-of-the-week-julian-opie-walking-statuettes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wow\/wow-work-of-the-week-julian-opie-walking-statuettes","title":{"rendered":"WOW! \u2013 Work of the Week \u2013 Julian Opie \u2013 Walking Statuettes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Julian Opie<\/div>\n
Walking Statuettes<\/div>\n
2017<\/div>\n
Series of seven hand-painted statuettes<\/div>\n
Various sizes<\/div>\n
Edition of 30<\/div>\n
Signed and numbered<\/div>\n
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“I don\u2019t invent or imagine things, just notice and record them.”<\/div>\n
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Julian Opie is a master in the reductive style. He expertly captures the essence and individuality of each of his subjects with minimal line-work and flat, solid colors. His highly stylized works can be characterized as a blend of Pop Art, Minimalism with contemporary sensibility that capture the world around us precisely.<\/div>\n
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Employing a variety of media and technologies, Opie distills everyday experiences into concise but evocative renditions, and his clean, thickly outlined figures have made an iconic impression on the contemporary art world.<\/div>\n
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Opie’s figures are typically drawn from photographs of people walking in the streets. He has admittedly gone through hundreds of pictures of passers-by and picks a select few to draw, which he saves as a palette of characters to use for his creations. According to the artist, each personage gives him surprises and opportunities to create individuality, that he could not invent, such as clothing or hairstyles. He then arranges them back into a crowd, and, like any crowd on the street, the composition is made up of strangers who walk distractedly, never interacting with one another. By making groups of walkers, Opie<\/div>\n
composes a street crowd.<\/div>\n
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This week’s Work of the Week! WOW! is Walking Statuettes.<\/div>\n
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These 7 Walking Statuettes displayed together form exactly that, a group of walkers forming a \u201cstreet or sidewalk crowd\u201d<\/div>\n
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Opie’s inspiration for his statuettes stemmed from his grandfather’s walnut and leather desk, upon which, as a child, items sat at his eye-level – Bakelite lamps and stone pen holders, leather-bound books and glass bottles of ink. These items turned the desk into their own surface. In turn, the Walking Statuettes by Opie, turn their surface into a pavement, such as a busy road populated with people checking their phones and shifting their balance and bags. His creations are models, stand-ins, that can be placed and played with.<\/div>\n
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Julian Opie observes people closely, and like a caricaturist, he has a formidable eye for foibles idiosyncrasies and character. The paradox is that he renders these nuances in a flattened, abstract style that seems at first glance to be uniform and cold, yet, each statuette seems individual and real.<\/div>\n
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The entire series of resin statuettes are hand-painted front and back.\u00a0Each statuette stands approximately 14 -16 inches in height, and 5 – 8 inches wide individually.\u00a0Each figurine features the artist’s signature and edition number on the bottom of each figurine. Arrange them anyway you like to create your own street scene.<\/div>\n
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Drawing influence from classical portraiture, as well as public life in today\u2019s modern society, the artist connects the clean visual language of modern life, with the fundamentals of art history. His themes have been described as “engagement with art history, use of new technology, obsession with the human body.”<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Julian Opie Walking Statuettes 2017 Series of seven hand-painted statuettes Various sizes Edition of 30 Signed and numbered “I don\u2019t invent or imagine things, just notice and record them.” Julian Opie is a master in the reductive style. He expertly … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[16,79,14,84,25,248,8,83,9,123,15,102,73,124,46,47,56,595,88,69,222,17,89],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1095"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1097,"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095\/revisions\/1097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}