While the Nunan-Cartwright Family and the Sydney Nolan Trust are bringing Australian art to London, British artist Julian Opie is off to Melbourne to show, along with other works, silhouettes of people walking around Melbourne itself.
Opie’s work celebrates modern urban life; we enjoy his stylised figures of people walking, running and enjoying the city. Stroll down Carnaby Street in London and you will find one of his trademark walking figures at full-size.
Behind a discrete door on Pall Mall, home of many of London’s oldest-established Clubs, Opie is celebrating the architecture of the modern city with his ‘Modern Towers’ and prints of office windows, architecturally perfect and not cluttered with pot plants, photographs of lovers and children and other personal items that spoil the architectural discipline, along with other works which both continue to celebrate life in the city but also move further afield to the Cornish coastline, at the Alan Cristea Gallery which itself is in the heart of London – in Mayfair, though an area in which the modern tower block will never be allowed by the planners: it is an interesting challenge for Opie to bring the modern tower block into the protected environment of Mayfair.
Also, there is a subtle omission – Opie celebrates modern towers for office/metropolitan life – there is nothing about towers as places in which to live, which is a subject of current discussion in the architectural world.