Julian Opie

Known for his cool, clean, comics-inspired pictorial language, Julian Opie has been one of the leading figures in contemporary British art since the early 1980s. Equally at home in museum settings--like Tate Modern, the ICA Boston and MCA Chicago, where he has mounted recent one-person exhibitions and projects--and in collaboration with mainstream rock bands like Blur and U2, his work crosses media and genres with quiet, computer-assisted abandon. In the early days, Opie transgressed the boundaries between painting and sculpture by applying paint to the everyday articles he used in his steel objects. More recently he has experimented with digital technologies in the applied arts. Now, he is probably best-known for his hypnotically low-tech moving images generated by LCD and LED technologies. This volume assembles a representative collection of portraits, half-length figures and new works that draw from the motifs of baroque portraiture.