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There’s something profoundly essential and revealing in Julian Opie’s handling of the human figure—how he distills both the universality and individuality of his subjects into a basic silhouette formed with just a few graphic lines. His figures, as if lifted from an instruction manual, evolve to embody the uniqueness of the people who inspired them.
Today, Opie is best known for his universally beloved walking figures that grace public and private spaces across the globe, but his journey to this signature style was a long one, shaped by careful observation of human behavior. Observer caught up with the artist to delve deeper into the origins of this now-iconic vocabulary, coinciding with his solo show at Lisson Gallery—his first in New York in five years.
According to Opie, his early work often centered on everyday objects, domestic environments and architecture, all bound together through stories. “I was using images of objects, books, chairs, newspapers, paintings, stuff around me, checkbooks, things in your pockets. They were things that I could physically draw easily and play with. So they became like a language.” It was as though he was probing the realm of human action without directly engaging with the human figure itself—indeed, that was the critique leveled at Opie during his first major museum show at the Hayward Gallery in London. “They went very hard on me. I was quite young in those days to be having a museum show, so there was a lot of negativity,” he says. “One of the main criticisms was there were humans in the show, which I thought was a very odd criticism, but it made me think.”
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Opie began searching for universal characters that could, much like simple toy cars can represent vehicles, stand in for real human figures. “I started to look for graphic images of people that I could adapt into my kind of language and use.” Ironically, he found them in the stylization of Egyptian hieroglyphics and the classic male and female bathroom signs. “Those were like a universal image, despite being very far from how people really behave. I needed a shared, existing language.” Using a computer, Opie began overlaying images of his closest friends onto these restroom symbols. “They were not standing statically as the sign, so I started to bend them. This allowed me to approach drawing humans and bring individuality.”
Standing in the newly installed show, Opie explains how the Lisson Gallery exhibition extends his longtime observation of people walking in the street. He points out that throughout art history, artists have worked to convey movement in the human figure—walking, hunting, dancing or any motion that gives the illusion of life—infusing it with a sense of naturalism that captures the energy that makes us feel alive. “I’ve been looking at walking people out on the street for a long time. I’ve also dealt with people dancing because it’s a different human movement. I dealt with people running, both normal people like you and me for the bus and athletes running.” Over four decades, Opie has refined this uniquely universal yet unmistakably his own “language of forms, of images, of people”—a style that emerged from this close study and observation of contemporary life.
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His walking silhouettes, in particular, have become his most recognizable works in public spaces, perfectly suited to engage a broader audience otherwise immersed in their daily lives and not necessarily inclined to stop and contemplate art. But many instinctively mirror the rhythm of these figures as they move through the urban flow, and it’s from this idea that Opie’s Busan Walkers series of 2023 emerged—freestanding walking silhouettes rendered in high-gloss auto paint on aluminum, mounted on massive concrete blocks. Conceived through studying people walking along the beachside in Busan, Korea, Red phone. (2023) and Yellow phone. (2023) depict figures in motion, absorbed in their mobile devices, which have become an inseparable extension of the human body, existing simultaneously in the physical world and virtual space.
Yet while Opie has long depicted adult figures in his walking crowds, the exhibition marks the first time he has focused on children, who take center stage in his monumental murals and wall-mounted digital animations.
For the show’s wall works, he engaged directly with children of different ages and grade levels, capturing their natural movements, postures and walking rhythms. Though their figures are ultimately reduced to a few graphic lines and bold flat colors, the distinctive proportions of their limbs and the speed and cadence of their steps remain telling. In the video animations, these elements still convey their individual personalities, revealing how much of our identity is expressed through our physical gestures in the world.
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The multi-panel murals, despite their cartoon-like, almost rubbery appearance, are actually hand-painted on stone—a detail that becomes evident upon closer inspection, evoking the monumental friezes of temples and ancient sculptures. More interestingly, as one moves nearer, the works begin to dissolve into abstraction: the thick black lines that define the figures start to dominate, consuming the bodies they outline and breaking them down into a fragmented visual composition that only coalesces when viewed from a distance.
“Ultimately, we are all figures, symbols and numbers living in a very abstract world. Once we take away the emotional and psychological side, we read the reality through,” Opie reflects. “We live in a very abstract world, where everything is decoded through numbers and data.”
His freestanding figures generate a similar tension. Their starkly thick outlines, mounted on heavy cast concrete bases, exist somewhere between image and object. But when viewed head-on, they resolve into nothing but graphic silhouettes—visual information distilled to its most essential form, despite the carefully engineered structures that allow them to stand. Even the figures in Opie’s LED animations manifest only as an arrangement of pixels, flickering to life in precise coordination, their colors dictated by a specific data set. These coded instructions dictate their presence, making them appear, move and exist again.
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As much as Opie’s practice is meticulously planned, strategically designed and heavily reliant on external technology, which not only allows his figures to exist in a world of numbers and data but also to emerge from it, he still places immense importance on the direct observation of human behavior and its initial translation into drawing. From the school videos he recorded, he created at least forty drawings, overlaying them on the originals to refine and develop the final animation. Notably, his figures never leave the frame; their rhythmic, syncopated movements remain contained within it, suggesting a perpetual liveliness, a motion that could potentially repeat forever. “They move in and out of time… It’s not got a beginning and an end. It’s an endless program,” he explains, emphasizing that the figures are not the product of a fixed file but rather an algorithm that continuously reinvents itself by reprocessing the original data. “It appeared much more real to me.”
Arguably, Opie’s art is not merely about representation but about capturing the recurring patterns of human behavior, the way people move and react to their surroundings. He searches for an underlying order, an essential numerical structure that can only be expressed through a distilled abstraction, one that edges toward universality.
This pursuit of the universal human experience—distilled into instantly recognizable symbols—is precisely what makes Opie’s art so ideally suited for public and outdoor commissions, where works must engage with crowds that are not necessarily predisposed to contemplating art. “I always thought of making artworks as a public act of communication,” he says. “I don’t see it as a personal thing that I would do in my room and then just do another one for me. Making the work is the beginning, but showing it is the end.”
It is when Opie’s art enters the real world, encountering an audience, that its full potential as a universal language is realized. His figures become symbols in which people of all ages and backgrounds can see themselves, connect with and intuitively respond to—much like the way we unconsciously absorb road signs, building markers or statistical charts that attempt to distill individuality into broad collective patterns.
“Julian Opie” is on view at Lisson Gallery in New York through April 19, 2025.
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