Visual Artist Julian Opie Is Heading East

Julian Opie has been making art since he was 12. While his friends were misbehaving after school, he was in his bedroom in 1970s Oxford, working on one project after another, revising and remaking. That is where and when, he says, his driving need to go back to things began. He was always figuring out how to make a piece better than he had the day before. “I’ve been doing that ever since,” he says.

Opie, now 58, has been a success from the moment he graduated, in 1982. He’d studied at Goldsmiths University in London under conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin, whose way of thinking, Opie says, was a close match with his own. His degree show—a multimedia combination of animated films, wall paintings, fish tanks and perfume—sparked interest almost immediately from collectors and galleries such as the Lisson, which still represents him. Opie has exhibited his paintings and sculptures internationally and reached beyond at London’s Royal Opera House.