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Julian Opie Earphones (from Boston Statuettes) For Sale
Julian Opie
Earphones (from Boston Statuettes), 2020
Patinated black bronze on Crema Grey stone base
21 × 4 3/4 × 6 1/2 in | 53.3 × 12.1 × 16.5 cm
About this work
Julian Opie has established himself as one of the most influential British artists of his generation, recognized internationally for his distinctive approach to figuration that distills the human form into essential lines and flat planes of color. His work occupies a unique position between fine art and public accessibility, drawing from sources as varied as classical portraiture, Japanese woodblock prints, road signage, and digital animation. Opie's pieces are held in major institutional collections worldwide, including the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Earphones, from the Boston Statuettes series of 2020, translates Opie's characteristic reductive visual language into three-dimensional form. The work depicts a solitary walking figure, rendered in patinated black bronze and mounted on a Crema Grey stone base. This series extends Opie's longstanding investigation into the anonymous urban pedestrian—figures absorbed in private worlds while moving through shared public space. The inclusion of earphones signals contemporary life's mediated experience, a subtle commentary on isolation within proximity that has defined much of Opie's sculptural output. The patinated bronze surface creates a striking silhouette effect, emphasizing the tension between the figure's physical presence and its schematic abstraction. At just over twenty-one inches in height, this edition of twenty-five offers collectors an intimate scale that retains the monumental quality of Opie's larger public commissions. The work demonstrates the artist's continued relevance in examining how we represent and perceive the human figure in an increasingly digitized world. For acquisition inquiries, please contact Guy Hepner.
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Edition & Provenance
- Year
- 2020
- Medium
- Patinated black bronze on Crema Grey stone base
- Edition
- Edition of 25
About Julian Opie
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.