Sara Dancing

Julian Opie is a master of reduction. The British artist developed his own aesthetic with impressive rigor and applies it in most different media. Opie lets his works hover between extreme presence and almost complete disappearance. His portraits consist of few lines, have point-shaped eyes and are obviously not made to show the portrayed person in its actual appearance. The figures of Julian Opie are minimalistic in the same sense, they rather represent the abstract idea of a body than the body itself. Julian Opie once expressed his fascination for traffic signs and their symbolic minimalism. It's just this principle of graphic display that is Opies artistic basis.