Julian Opie (b. 1958)

"Whilst drawing, I saw how each image went through a series of transformations. So I worked up a sequence of simple line portraits and I layered the drawings to animate the image, pushing it through various changes. It was just a portrait of someone's head but I turned it into an inventory of styles; so it would first be sharp-edged and spiky, like a Futurist portrait, and then it went soft and classical, and then it would become broken up and Cubist. It was as if a series of lenses had been put over someone's face and these lenses were art-historical styles" (J. Opie quoted in an interview with M. Horlock Julian Opie, Tate Gallery, London 2004).