Julian Opie (b. 1958)

'Opie's characters, his figures. In a world until then silent and in some way metaphysical, a world which began with the paintings in 1991 and is documented in the retrospective at the Hayward Gallery - and in which, as we can prove by looking through the catalogue, there is not a single figure - schematic figures, their faces reduced to a circle, first made their appearance in the 1990s. Since then, the presence of figures in Opie's paintings has gone "in crescendo." At first, these were, we should stress once more, schematic representations. Then, from 1998 onwards his first productions in this genre, Ellen, arts administrator, and Paul, teacher, date back to this year - these figures became specific characters, individuals from the artist's immediate environment' (J. M. Bonet, "The Painter of Modern Life", Julian Opie, Show Time, exh. cat., CAC Malaga, Malaga 2007).
Ellen, arts administrator opened the doorway to a series that would occupy much of Julian Opie's career to date. Experimenting beyond the confines of his classic stick-figure portraits, Opie began to mirror the Warholian concept of portraiture through the planed-down delineations of the face with passages of bold colours. However, unlike Warhol's famous sitters, Opie instead opts to not to use the sitter as a statement, but rather leaves them fairly anonymous through the use of a generic moniker.