Julian Opie
24 Nov 2006 - 13 Jan 2007
JULIAN OPIE
"This Is Shahnoza"
Opening: Thursday, 23 November 2006, 6 to 8 p.m.
For over two decades, Julian Opie (1958) has ranked amongst the most important representatives of contemporary art in Britain. His work can be seen in major collections worldwide, such as Tate Modern, London, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lehnbachhaus München, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Kunsthaus Zürich. Opie’s unmistakable visual idiom is characterised by the reduction of individual features of the human figure to just a few telling lines or by the representation of physiognomic features so schematic that the portrait resembles a pictogram. The same procedure is applied to landscapes and architectures, which are condensed into clearly legible typologies. Opie’s artistic agenda of detaching the picture from its support and resurrecting it as a wall painting, sculpture, light box, video film, vinyl image or c-print testifies to his readiness to experiment with various media, including non-artistic ones. He not only explores existing technologies but also charts new territory in his quest for new forms of visual creation.
In the fourth exhibition of his work, the cycle ‘This is Shahnoza’, 2006 reaffirms Julian Opie’s interest in the human figure and its movements. In contrast to earlier series like ‘This is Monique’, which foreground the vertical and static attitude of the female figure, the figures in the artist's new series show ‘a more dynamic pose’. To this end, Opie has documented the movements of the striptease dancer Shahnoza in over 2000 photographs and several hours of video. Having met her in a London nightclub while looking for a suitable model, the artist made detailed drawings of the twisting and turning body, its exhibitionist gestures and erotic poses. In analogy to Muybridge, who captured motion step by step in his historic snapshot sequences of photographs, Opie analysed countless individual poses and redrawing the digital shots directly on the monitor.
Having eliminated the voluptuous setting of the nightclub and thus isolating the movement from the situation in which it occurs, the artist has retained only the pole around which Shahnoza gyrates. ‘It occurred to me that the only way to get a more dynamic pose while keeping the body free of any background was to use a pole for the model to hang from and lean against. The pole allows the body to be seen from various angles in various positions.’ At the same time, the pole becomes an element of the composition in the large-format vinyl works, rendered in gold and silver. The pole does not extend to the top of the picture but rather adjoins an imaginary ceiling beam, which turns the sexualised object into an architectural support that ‘connect[s] with the symmetry of the room in the manner of caryatids’. Opie’s allusion to caryatids, the female figures of classical antiquity which functioned as columns, underscores the sculptural and site-specific implications of his work, his interest in the proportions and volumes of the body and in the rhythm and balance of movement. The black contours of the dancer also evoke the art of Japanese woodcutter Kitagawa Utamaro, whose flat representations of the female body have long been a source of inspiration for Opie.
Birgid Uccia
© Julian Opie
Shahnoza, pole dancer, 2006
Vinyl on wooden stretcher
192 x 155.2 cm
75.6 x 61.1 in
"This Is Shahnoza"
Opening: Thursday, 23 November 2006, 6 to 8 p.m.
For over two decades, Julian Opie (1958) has ranked amongst the most important representatives of contemporary art in Britain. His work can be seen in major collections worldwide, such as Tate Modern, London, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lehnbachhaus München, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Kunsthaus Zürich. Opie’s unmistakable visual idiom is characterised by the reduction of individual features of the human figure to just a few telling lines or by the representation of physiognomic features so schematic that the portrait resembles a pictogram. The same procedure is applied to landscapes and architectures, which are condensed into clearly legible typologies. Opie’s artistic agenda of detaching the picture from its support and resurrecting it as a wall painting, sculpture, light box, video film, vinyl image or c-print testifies to his readiness to experiment with various media, including non-artistic ones. He not only explores existing technologies but also charts new territory in his quest for new forms of visual creation.
In the fourth exhibition of his work, the cycle ‘This is Shahnoza’, 2006 reaffirms Julian Opie’s interest in the human figure and its movements. In contrast to earlier series like ‘This is Monique’, which foreground the vertical and static attitude of the female figure, the figures in the artist's new series show ‘a more dynamic pose’. To this end, Opie has documented the movements of the striptease dancer Shahnoza in over 2000 photographs and several hours of video. Having met her in a London nightclub while looking for a suitable model, the artist made detailed drawings of the twisting and turning body, its exhibitionist gestures and erotic poses. In analogy to Muybridge, who captured motion step by step in his historic snapshot sequences of photographs, Opie analysed countless individual poses and redrawing the digital shots directly on the monitor.
Having eliminated the voluptuous setting of the nightclub and thus isolating the movement from the situation in which it occurs, the artist has retained only the pole around which Shahnoza gyrates. ‘It occurred to me that the only way to get a more dynamic pose while keeping the body free of any background was to use a pole for the model to hang from and lean against. The pole allows the body to be seen from various angles in various positions.’ At the same time, the pole becomes an element of the composition in the large-format vinyl works, rendered in gold and silver. The pole does not extend to the top of the picture but rather adjoins an imaginary ceiling beam, which turns the sexualised object into an architectural support that ‘connect[s] with the symmetry of the room in the manner of caryatids’. Opie’s allusion to caryatids, the female figures of classical antiquity which functioned as columns, underscores the sculptural and site-specific implications of his work, his interest in the proportions and volumes of the body and in the rhythm and balance of movement. The black contours of the dancer also evoke the art of Japanese woodcutter Kitagawa Utamaro, whose flat representations of the female body have long been a source of inspiration for Opie.
Birgid Uccia
© Julian Opie
Shahnoza, pole dancer, 2006
Vinyl on wooden stretcher
192 x 155.2 cm
75.6 x 61.1 in