
Bijou Gets Undressed
6 works

Dance Synched 3, 2024
Screen print in 12 colours on archival museum board
37 3/4 x 59 1/2 in 95.9 x 151.1 cm
Edition of 45 + 5 APs
Julian Opie’s Dance Synced series captures the rhythm and movement of the human body in his iconic minimalist style. Using bold lines and simplified forms, Opie animates figures in repetitive dance sequences, creating a hypnotic visual rhythm that mirrors the beat of contemporary life. The series blurs the line between digital art and performance, celebrating motion, identity, and the universal language of dance.
Price on Application

Woman Taking Off a Man's Shirt 5 · Julian Opie · Artcurial · 2025-05 · $4,377

Ann, dancer.4 · Julian Opie · Sotheby's · 2026-02 · $51,200

Woman Taking Off Man's Shirt · Julian Opie · Phillips · 2026-01 · $2,277

Dance 2, from Dance Synced · Julian Opie · Bonhams · 2025-11 · $0

Woman Taking Off Man's Shirt · Julian Opie · Phillips · 2025-06 · $1,965

Julian Opie's "Dance Synched" series represents a captivating exploration of human movement, rhythm, and the visual language of contemporary dance, rendered through the artist's unmistakable aesthetic of bold outlines and vibrant flat color. Comprising five distinct works—Dance Synched 1 through Dance Synched 5—this series captures the essence of choreographed motion with a precision and clarity that has become synonymous with Opie's celebrated practice. Each piece in the collection freezes a moment of synchronized movement, transforming the ephemeral nature of dance into something permanent, iconic, and immediately recognizable.
Throughout his distinguished career, Julian Opie has consistently demonstrated an extraordinary ability to distill complex visual information into its most essential elements. Born in London in 1958 and now represented by the prestigious Lisson Gallery, Opie has developed a visual vocabulary that bridges the gap between fine art, graphic design, and popular culture. His signature style—characterized by thick black contour lines, minimal facial features, and expansive areas of unmodulated color—has made his work instantly identifiable across the globe. The "Dance Synched" series exemplifies this refined approach while pushing into territory that emphasizes the collective experience of movement and the relationship between individual bodies working in harmony.
What distinguishes the "Dance Synched" series from Opie's broader exploration of figures in motion is its specific focus on the synchronized aspect of dance. While Opie has long been fascinated by walking figures, runners, and individuals caught in everyday locomotion, this series investigates the particular visual poetry that emerges when multiple bodies move as one. The synchronization referenced in the title speaks not only to the coordination between dancers but also to a deeper harmony between form, color, and composition that Opie orchestrates within each work. The figures appear caught in moments of perfect alignment, their poses echoing and complementing one another in ways that create visual rhythms across the picture plane.
Opie's treatment of the dancing figures demonstrates his masterful understanding of how reduction can paradoxically enhance emotional and kinetic impact. By stripping away superfluous detail—eliminating individual facial features, simplifying clothing into blocks of saturated color, and reducing anatomical complexity to flowing contours—Opie creates figures that are simultaneously anonymous and universal. The dancers in the "Dance Synched" series could be anyone, yet they resonate with a specificity of gesture and pose that suggests real observation. This tension between the generic and the particular lies at the heart of Opie's artistic philosophy, and it finds especially powerful expression in these works where the subject matter itself involves the sublimation of individual identity into collective movement.
The formal qualities of the "Dance Synched" series reward sustained attention. Opie's color choices are deliberate and sophisticated, with each hue selected not merely for aesthetic appeal but for its capacity to define form, suggest depth, and create visual relationships between figures. The flat application of color, devoid of gradient or shadow, lends the works a graphic immediacy that connects them to signage, digital interfaces, and the visual shorthand of contemporary urban life. Yet there is nothing simplistic about this flatness; rather, it represents a considered artistic choice that amplifies the essential shapes and movements Opie wishes to communicate. The black outlines that define each figure possess a confident fluidity, capturing the grace of dance while maintaining the bold clarity that makes Opie's work so visually striking.
The "Dance Synched" series also reflects Opie's ongoing engagement with technology and contemporary visual culture. His work has always existed at the intersection of traditional artistic practice and digital aesthetics, and these pieces continue that dialogue. The clean lines and solid colors evoke the vector graphics of computer-generated imagery, while the subject matter—dance, with all its physical presence and human warmth—grounds the work in bodily experience. This synthesis of the digital and the corporeal gives the series a contemporary relevance that speaks to our current moment, when screens mediate so much of our visual experience yet we remain drawn to the irreducibly human act of moving together in space.
Each of the five works in the series—Dance Synched 1, Dance Synched 2, Dance Synched 3, Dance Synched 4, and Dance Synched 5—offers a distinct composition while maintaining cohesion through shared aesthetic principles and thematic concerns. Collected together, they form a meditation on movement, synchronicity, and the visual pleasure of bodies in coordinated action. Individually, each work stands as a complete artistic statement, capable of transforming any space with its vibrant presence and dynamic energy. The series demonstrates why Julian Opie remains one of the most significant and recognizable artists working today, his ability to create images that feel both timeless and utterly contemporary undiminished after decades of prolific output.
For collectors and art enthusiasts seeking to acquire works from Julian Opie's "Dance Synched" series, Guy Hepner in New York offers expert guidance and access to these remarkable pieces that celebrate the intersection of movement, minimalism, and modern visual culture.

Julian Opie (b. 1958, London) is one of the most recognisable and widely exhibited British artists of his generation, a painter, sculptor, and printmaker whose stripped-back figurative language has achieved both the commercial viability of design and the conceptual seriousness of fine art — a combination that few artists of any era have managed with equal confidence. Opie studied at Goldsmiths College under Michael Craig-Martin, graduating in 1982, and was representing by a major London gallery almost immediately. He has been a significant presence in the international art world for over four decades.
Opie's visual language is built from a small number of radical formal decisions: bold black outlines, flat unmodulated colour fields, the elimination of shadow, texture, and incidental detail, and a scale and graphic authority that draws openly on Egyptian hieroglyphics, Japanese woodblock printing, public signage, and the simplified conventions of digital interfaces. The result is a style of immediate recognisability — when you encounter a Julian Opie figure, you know it instantly — that nonetheless contains real formal thought about how images communicate, how representation functions, and what remains when almost everything is removed. His Walking Figures series, in which anonymous pedestrians in continuous motion are rendered in his signature distilled vocabulary and presented as both print editions and LED wall sculptures, has become one of the most compelling ongoing investigations in contemporary art into the relationship between the ancient idea of the frieze, the vernacular language of the public sign, and the aesthetic possibilities of the LED screen.
In 2000, Opie created the cover artwork for Blur's Best Of compilation — four simplified band portraits in his trademark style — bringing his visual language to an audience of millions and cementing his profile as an artist operating meaningfully across the boundary between fine art and popular culture. His portrait series, his landscape works, and his permanent public installations — including major commissions at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London — extend the reach of his practice into civic and architectural contexts. At the major auction houses, significant Opie works have traded in the £200,000–£500,000 range at Christie's and Sotheby's, while his print editions range from thousands to tens of thousands of pounds, providing entry points across a wide spectrum of collector budgets. His work is held in the Tate Collection, among other public institutions.
His media range is notably broad: silkscreen prints, vinyl paintings, LED panels, lenticular works, and public sculptures are all produced with equal technical rigour and formal clarity.
Guy Hepner maintains strong inventory and expertise in Julian Opie's print editions and LED works. Our gallery at 177 Tenth Avenue, New York offers collectors expert guidance on acquisition and valuation. We provide free, confidential valuations for those looking to sell Opie works and active connections to buyers engaged with this market.