La Llotja de Palma will host the Julian Opie exhibition, which will be inaugurated on 26th April and will feature 14 pieces specially selected by the British artist.
Julian Opie’s sculptures, installations and LCD films will also be on display in Passeig Sagrera, Passeig del Born and Casal Solleric.
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The exhibition has been organised by the Govern de les Illes Balears in collaboration with the Ajuntament de Palma and the Mario Sequeira Gallery, which represents the artist in Portugal.
La Llotja de Palma will host the new exhibition by the renowned London artist Julian Opie, which will be open to the public from the 26th of April until the 31st of August. Opie has conceived this project as an intervention that encompasses several spaces. In La Llotja he will install 12 works that are aligned with the geometry of the interior works and reflect the themes that have long characterised his work: the figure in movement, the human face and the architecture of the world around us. In the square outside this historic building, two gigantic steel sculptures will tower above the crowd. On Passeig Sagrera and Passeig del Born two of his famous LED animated sculptures will move to the rhythm of passers-by, and finally in the Casal Solleric visitors will encounter a large-scale installation and an LCD animation, the latter visible from the street. This project is linked to the commitment of the Govern de les Illes Balears and the Ajuntament de Palma to turn La Llotja and Palma into one of the world’s leading destinations for contemporary art.
“A space as beautiful as La Llotja needs nothing more, and yet the challenge is to fill it with art without disturbing the balance and ambience of the interior. It is a very pure architecture with a simple grid design that forms twelve squares around the six columns, each square marked with vivid orange marble tiles. I have devised an exhibition in which I place an artwork in the centre of each square, trying to reflect the rhythm of the interior, a system that allows me to show four variations on three sets of work,” explains Julian Opie. “As I often do, I have tried to extend the works beyond the site and into the city by broadening the discussion about portraits and monuments, the language of drawing and the process of recognising and interpreting images,” he adds.
Julian Opie
Julian Opie was born in London and graduated from Goldsmiths School of Art in 1983. He lives and works in London. His distinctive formal language is instantly recognisable and reflects his artistic preoccupation with the idea of representation and how images are perceived and interpreted.
Always exploring different techniques, both classical and avant-garde, Opie plays with ways of seeing by reinterpreting the vocabulary of everyday life; his reductive style evokes both a visual and spatial experience of the world around us. Drawing inspiration from classical portraiture, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Japanese woodcuts, as well as public signage, information boards and road signs, Opie connects the clean visual language of modern life with the fundamentals of art history.
His museum exhibitions include Hayward Gallery and ICA (London); MAK (Vienna); Mito Tower (Japan); MoCAK (Krakow); Fosun Foundation (Shanghai); National Gallery of Victoria (Australia) and Berardo Museum (Lisbon), as well as the Delhi Triennial, NGV Triennial, Venice Biennale and Documenta. His public projects include City Hall Park in New York; the Vltava River in Prague; the Seoul Square Building in South Korea; The Lindo Wing at St Mary’s Hospital in London; the PKZ in Zurich; the 535 Tower in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong; the Fosun Foundation in Shanghai; the Hyundai General Store in Seoul and Pacific Place in Hong Kong.
His work is part of public collections such as Tate, British Museum, Victoria & Albert, Arts Council, British Council and National Portrait Gallery (London), MoMA (New York), ICA (Boston), Essl Collection (Vienna), IVAM (Valencia), Berardo Collection Museum (Lisbon), Israel Museum (Jerusalem), National Gallery of Victoria (Australia) and Takamatsu Art Museum (Japan).
The Llotja
La Llotja de Palma is the main reference point for civil Gothic architecture in Mallorca. Its architect is Guillem Sagrera, and it was built between the 15th and 16th centuries. Today it is recognised as one of Mallorca’s most important architectural treasures and an unmissable destination for lovers of history, architecture and art. The building has a rectangular floor plan, and the interior is made up of a single roof with a ribbed vault supported by six impressive helicoidal columns.
The Govern de les Illes Balears and the Ajuntament de Palma are working together with the aim of positioning La Llotja and Palma as a reference point for contemporary art worldwide, developing a permanent programme of exhibitions by internationally renowned artists. This is the case of Julian Opie, whose exhibition will be the second to be held in this building from June 2023 after that of the Portuguese Pedro Cabrita Reis, which has received more than 200,000 visits.