For his first exhibition at the new space of the Lisson Gallery in Beijing, the celebrated British artist Julian Opie offers a playful itinerary which centres around the recurring methods and themes of his career, embracing the diverse languages of painting, sculpture, advertising and even music. In one of the exhibition halls, a group of reclining figures in stainless steel, inspired in form by the ancient tribal wooden statues of South-East Asia, is set next to a new series of “light-boxes” created in a new style and focused on landscapes - these are stylised depictions of the French countryside, with roads, fields and mountains transformed into abstract graphic forms. In the adjoining exhibition hall, visitors are greeted by a sequence of figures performing “shuffle” dances which went viral on Tik-Tok. To add more rhythm and energy to the experience, Opie had a musician create a playlist to be played in a loop, inspired by the electronic dance music of the early years of this century. A personal exhibition which presents motifs which have become iconic and which make space for the new technical and iconographic experiments of the artist, demonstrating the vitality and creativity in continuous dialogue with the quotidian.
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