Bijou Gets Undressed
6 works
Julian Opie Sprinters, Paris (Women) For Sale
Julian Opie
Sprinters, Paris (Women), 2024
Laser cut museum board relief
39 × 52 × 2 in | 99.1 × 132.1 × 5.1 cm with frame included
About this work
Julian Opie has established himself as one of the most distinctive figures in contemporary art, known for his reductive visual language that distills the human form into bold outlines and flat planes of color. His work occupies a unique position at the intersection of fine art, public installation, and digital media, with pieces held in major institutional collections including the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Opie's market presence remains robust, with consistent demand at auction and through primary channels reflecting sustained collector confidence in his practice. *Sprinters, Paris (Women)* from 2024 exemplifies Opie's ongoing investigation into movement and the figure in motion. The work captures female athletes mid-stride, their forms rendered in the artist's signature simplified aesthetic that strips away detail while preserving essential dynamism. Executed as a laser cut museum board relief, the piece extends beyond traditional printmaking into three-dimensional territory, with the two-inch depth creating subtle shadows that animate the surface as viewing angles shift. This sculptural quality adds a tactile dimension that distinguishes Opie's relief works from his screen prints and lenticular pieces. The edition of 36 positions this work as accessible relative to Opie's unique pieces while maintaining the scarcity that collectors seek. The subject matter connects to the artist's well-documented fascination with urban life and human locomotion, themes he has explored across walking figures, runners, and crowds throughout his career. For acquisition inquiries regarding this work, please contact Guy Hepner.
Browse Series
Edition & Provenance
- Year
- 2024
- Medium
- Laser cut museum board relief
- Edition
- Edition of 36
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.