Julian Opie

Julian Opie was born in London in 1958 and grew up in Oxford. He attended the Dragon School and then Magdalen College School, Oxford, from 1972 to 1977, before completing a foundation course at Chelsea College of Art. He went on to Goldsmiths, University of London, where he studied Fine Art under Michael Craig-Martin; Goldsmiths' own record and other sources give his graduation year as 1982, while other sources state 1983, and public sources do not agree on which is correct.

He emerged in the early 1980s in the orbit of New British Sculpture, alongside artists such as Anish Kapoor and Tony Cragg, and was included in documenta 8 in Kassel in 1987. In 1995, he held the Sargant Fellowship at the British School at Rome. His work reached a much wider public in 2000, when he designed the cover of Blur's Best of Blur, for which he received the Music Week CADS Award for Best Illustration in 2001.

Over the following decades Opie built a body of work spanning painting, sculpture, and LED and digital animation, showing at institutions including the Hayward Gallery and Barbican Art Gallery in London, Kunstverein Köln, the Lenbachhaus in Munich, K21 in Düsseldorf, MAK in Vienna, Art Tower Mito in Japan, and IVAM in Valencia, and representing the United Kingdom at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. He continues to live and work in London, based in Shoreditch.

Opie is widely discussed as a bridge between Pop art's interest in mass imagery and a more conceptual, systems-based approach to figuration, translating photographs of walking commuters, portrait sitters, and landscapes into flattened, outline-based images that recur across painting, print, sculpture, and LED screens. His inclusion in New British Sculpture and later in exhibitions at institutions from the Barbican to the National Gallery of Victoria reflects a critical consensus that his reductive line is a durable visual language rather than a passing style.

Opie's secondary market centers on prints, editions, and multiples rather than a deep run of unique paintings or sculptures, and public auction results for him are comparatively sparse. The best-documented result is GBP 160,750 (approximately USD 218,750) for Walking in Sadang-dong in the Rain, sold at Seoul Auction in Seoul on 23 March 2021. At least one source describes a different, undisclosed work, Woman Posing In Underwear 1, as an even higher price, but does not publish the amount, auction house, or date, so it cannot be confirmed as the definitive auction record. Other results for the artist's prints and editions are reported well below this figure, suggesting a market where a small number of strong results sit above a generally modest level of activity.

Opie's practice spans several mediums, painting, sculpture, prints, and LED or digital animation, and collectors should be attentive to which category a given work falls into, since pricing and liquidity differ sharply between unique works and editions. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so verification relies on the artist's studio and his primary galleries, Lisson Gallery and Cristea Roberts Gallery, particularly for prints and multiples where authentication questions are most common. Public auction data for Opie is limited, and even the highest documented price may not be the true all-time record, so any single result should be read as one data point rather than a stable market trend.