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One of Opie's animal sculptures in City Hall Park
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On your next stroll through the park surrounding City Hall, don't be alarmed if you come across a brown cow grazing in the grass, or a perhaps a yellow chicken clucking along nearby. Despite appearances, the park isn't being turned into a barnyard for farm animals. Instead, it's become the exhibition site for a series of sculptures by British contemporary artist Julian Opie.
The animals are part of a nine-piece installation entitled "Julian Opie: Animals, Buildings, Cars and People," which will be scattered throughout the park until October 2005. The show is presented by the Public Art Fund and sponsored by Forest City Ratner Companies.
"The park offers something we haven't done before -- a major retrospective of an artist," said Tom Eccles, director of the Public Art Fund. "The vibrancy of the city is an ideal environment to see Julian's work."
"His work is like your little sister came along and put toys on your train set," Eccles added. "While they are seemingly simple, they are extremely complex."
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| Opie's sculpture, "Imagine you are driving a white Honda" parked on Broadway |
Opie's sculptures depict realistic things with a playful twist. While giving a tour of his work to members of the press, Opie said that his inspiration comes from looking at things in the world. He relies on computer graphics to distill the images into another form, and then places the altered version on various mediums. "I am not changing things, but re-contextualizing them," he said.
The featured works range from a group of painted wooden animals called "Sheep Cow Deer Dog Chicken Cat Goat," to life-size, animated video images, representing a man, "Bruce," and woman, "Sara," walking in place on the steps of Tweed Courthouse. A cluster of three-dimensional modern skyscrapers entitled "City?" towers on the northern end of the park. Many of the things Opie depicts are made to near exact scale with their real counterparts. Take, for instance, "My Aunt's Sheep" or the compact cars that comprise the "Imagine you are driving a red Volkswagen" and "Imagine you are driving a white Honda" sculptures parked on Broadway.
"I am not trying to invent anything," Opie said. "I am melding together a lot of normals -- normal imagery, normal poses.'"
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| Opie's "6 Escaped Animals" and "Village?" in City Hall Park |
Opie reduces the thing at hand to its basic outline, flattening surfaces and omitting details like spots on a cow. The resulting images -- clear-cut figures with bold lines and bright surfaces -- read as clearly as traffic signs.
Even Opie's website toys with reality. The homepage is set up to resemble the screen of an older version of the Apple computer, with the standard icons located in its usual positions, though the icons don't allow site visitors to access anything.
Opie's art provides an adjusted portrayal of the physical world - and it is the ways that he alters what we are used to seeing that embody his distinct vision and style.
Opie said that he hopes for people looking at his sculptures to not bother trying to figure out if what stands before them is really "art" or search for what the artist intended by it. "These issues are dead," he said. Instead, Opie would like for the experience of passing by his sculptures to yield "a moment of communication" between the art and the viewer.
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| Julian Opie, the artist |
The City Hall Park exhibit is Opie's first major solo show in the United States. The sculptures on display in the park were all created within the past seven years. Opie's wider body of work, which includes paintings, sculptures, and film, has been shown in various settings all over the world since 1983. Venues have included the London-Heathrow Airport and galleries in Berlin, Milan, and Prague. Opie resides with his family in London.
Julian Opie's exhibit replaces four sculptures by Roy Lichtenstein that had been on display in the park since November 2003. The first exhibit presented by the Public Art Fund, "MetroSpective at City Hall Park," ran from January through October 2003. It was the park's first public art exhibit since 1992.
For more information about the City Hall Park exhibit, please visit www.publicartfund.org. For more on Julian Opie, please visit his website, www.julianopie.com.
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