Landscape?

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Whitehall

Landscape? is one of a series of six screenprints that Julian Opie produced between 1998 and 1999. He digitally altered a photograph of a natural scene and made hand-cut stencils from this image. He then used these to make the screenprint. His landscape is one erased of detail and reduced to its most basic elements: a green ground and trees depicted as simple brown trunks with a cloud shaped depicting the tree’s foliage. Two strips of blue at the back of the picture plane depict an undulating landscape and the sky is represented by a uniform pale blue. Yet the print is still able to evoke an atmosphere or a narrative of a landscape. The question mark in the title suggests a query about what is being represented. Opie’s work at the turn of the century often simulates the landscape of computer games, a relatively new genre at that time, or children’s books. He creates, in these works, a symbolic and depersonalised landscape based on a real one, offering his viewers a familiar, yet also an alien world to interact with and create their own journey within. 

Opie has often talked about ideas of commodification and of offering a product to his viewers to tailor to their own experience. Opie once said: ‘what I would really like to do is to make a painting and then walk into it.’ He expanded on this later on stating: ‘ I think my work is about trying to be happy. I want the world to seem like the kind of place you’d want to escape into. Mundane things are just as exciting as all the things you might imagine escaping into.’ 

Julian Opie was born in London where he still lives and works. He studied at Goldsmiths College, London from 1979 to 1982. He has received many commissions for his work: in 2000 he produced portraits of the pop band Blur for their album. He has exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally over the last four decades and his work is held in many important collections including Tate, Arts Council Collection and the National Portrait Gallery in the UK.

Places

Subjects

landscape C20th, tree, hill, field

Materials & Techniques

screenprint

Artist

Julian Opie (1958 - )

Title

Landscape?

Edition

21/40

Date

1998-1999

Medium

Screenprint

Dimensions

height: 61.10 cm, width: 87.90 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Alan Cristea Gallery, for the British Embassy, Moscow, April 2000

Inscription

verso bl: 21/40 Julian Opie '99

GAC number

17482