Julian Opie’s Figures Walk Between Individuality and Universal Humanity – Observer

2 March 2025

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.”

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.

Read more of the interview with the Observer here.