Initially photographing his subject matter – people, landscape or still lives – Julian Opie (b. 1958) is renowned for his use of digital manipulation to create images through a process of elimination and distillation. Through this technique, Opie has developed a concise and reductive formal language, which continually pushes the boundaries of ‘traditional’ artistic practice.

 

‘Winter and Other Landscapes’ centres around a new acquisition of works from the series Winter. (2012),a sequence of seventy-five prints that represent a circular walk taken by the artist through the French countryside on a harsh but beautiful day. The prints absorb an eclectic range of influences, from 17th-century Dutch landscape painting to Street View on Google Maps, and are at the forefront of Opie’s continued investigation into the experience of landscape.

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.