Julian Opie | The Whitewall Podcast

3 March 2025

Today, we’re talking with Julian Opie.

Julian Opie’s work is currently on view at Lisson Gallery in New York. The exhibition is his first in the city in five years, showcasing sculptures, animations, and paintings. Like drawings come to life, his monochrome sculptures in metal and relief paintings show people and children walking about their every day lives, on the phone, running errands, headed to school, jobs, or elsewhere.

Working from photographs, he reduces an image to the essential gesture, shapes, and colors in a way that is still remarkably revealing about his subjects. He plays with line, light, tone, and movement right to the edge where our eyes and our brain still recognize something as human, as moving, evoking feelings in our very core.

The London based artist is always ready to try out a new material or technology. He was one of the first to incorporate digital materials in sculpture, always conscious of the viewer’s comfortability with what they’re engaging with. His public works face pedestrian with the pedestrian, set in static or in motion at sites around the world.

Opie was in one of the very first editions of Whitewall, and the first ever issue I worked on, back in the early 2000s, so I was super excited to continue that conversation nearly two decades later.

Listen to the full podcast here.

Shown here: Exhibition view of ‘Julian Opie’at Lisson, Gallery New York,13 February–19 April 2025 © Julian Opie,Courtesy LissonGallery