THE SHIP. University, 2
Julian Opie has planted two giant steel sculptures in the Plaza del Patriarca—twelve meters high and weighing six tons—that wait with crossed arms. We had a great exhibition of Opie at the Bancaja Foundation in 2017, but at a press conference he renounced retrospectives in favor of the new, hence he created these sculptures expressly that coexist in the open sky with three-dimensional drawings of anonymous people who, still static, they transmit very different ways of walking and being. Influenced by anime, with its thick black lines drawn on a computer, The British artist reduces the human being to a very recognizable schematic silhouette, with its unmistakable seal. Already inside, in the cloister of La Nau, These now semi-hollow silhouettes of women have been raised to high pedestals that put them at the same level as the sculpture by Lluís Vives that presides over the space., a Valencian humanist of the Renaissance who took the opposite path to Opie, from the University of Valencia to the London court of Enrique VIII.
At the beginning of June, the Madrid Court forced the artist Antonio de Felipe to recognize the co-authorship of his former collaborator Fumiko Neguishi in 221 of his paintings. a few days before, in the presentation of this exhibition, With a stroke of his pen, the Briton shook off that old conception of the artist as a solitary genius who creates in his workshop with his own hands when he thanked his team for the work done to feed the exhibition.. The final part of the tour is indoors in the Academia Room. Here the silhouettes are trapped in their daily chores in planes and cubes, or are encouraged, deploying, For example, a good assortment of ways to run: with arms dropped or very close to the chest, shuffling or jumping, with the trunk stretched or bent... Ode to activity, cheerful and minimalist, in this exhibition that began to take shape in a pandemic that paralyzed many things. AU
