Julian Opie. Imagine you are driving

Works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection

20/07-03/09/2023

Opening: 20 luglio, ore 18.30

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

The exhibition “Image you are driving” is dedicated to the research of British artist Julian Opie (London, UK, 1958) through the presentation of a cycle of works created between 1993 and 1996, part of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection. At the centre of the exhibition project emerges the imagery of the car, a subject explored by Opie during the 1990s and early 2000s with his characteristic trait based on impersonality and formal simplification, straddling pop and minimalist stylistic features.

After graduating from Goldsmith College in London in 1982, Opie began working within the New British sculpture, a movement interested in developing a new relationship between sculpture and

urban culture through the use of discarded materials, in a clear reaction to minimalist and conceptual trends. Over the years Opie inaugurated a formal lexicon inspired by childhood games, but also by the emerging video games industry. His favourite subjects become the means of transport, people, and landscapes that characterise contemporary metropolises, stylised and traced in sharp backgrounds.

Opie’s imagery confronts the visual ideology of the goods and services society. His sculptures are presented as standardised products awaiting metaphorical consumption by the public, offerings onto which visitors can project their desires and aspirations. In Opie’s work we find echoes of the society described by the anthropologist Marc Augé in his famous publication “Non-places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity’ (1992). Augé sees the users of the contemporary landscape no longer as inhabitants in the traditional sense of the term, but rather as passers-by. Non-places are those anthropic spaces dedicated to circulation and consumption, anonymous places frequented by lonely people in which social relations are not produced, such as motorways, stations, airports. These infrastructures, due to their characteristic dimension of temporariness and transience, represent the condition of contemporary individualism, alienation and estrangement. Opie’s artistic research has been interested in these contradictions of contemporary society, constructing a visual universe capable of representing them with a detached ironic gaze. Attentive to the new frontiers of marketing visuals and the first representations in CGI (computer-generated imagery), Opie has imagined a reality tailored to the individual, a world that can only be experienced through the subjective vision of the spectator.

The exhibition ‘Julian Opie. Imagine you are driving’ was organised as part of the 90th anniversary celebrations of MAUTO – Museo Nazionale dell’Automobile.