INDIANAPOLIS—Starting in late September in downtown Indianapolis, British artist Julian Opie will be showing 11 different sculptures in "Signs," his largest-ever outdoor exhibition. The works range from small-scale pieces that look rather like road signs to a massive monument to rock star Bryan Adams; they will remain in place for a year.

Opie has been widely respected within the art world since he first emerged in the U.K. in the early 1980s, but his public standing was transformed when he designed the sleeve for the Best of Blur CD in 2000. This introduced his art to a whole new audience, and his stripped-down, cartoon-like drawing style has been widely imitated ever since.

Opie, who has undertaken many public projects, utilizes a wide range of digital technologies to produce his paintings, sculptures and video works. Most recently, elements of his video pieces were employed by U2 as part of the stage design on the band’s U.S. and European tours.


Julian, are there particular challenges to presenting public work in a city such as Indianapolis?

Compared to L.A. or New York, there is a certain kind of conservatism there, and when you’re dealing with outdoor sculpture, you’re much more prone to get into issues of this sort, because you’re not protected by a museum. You’re right out there in public.

It hasn’t been a limiting factor, but it’s certainly been a guiding factor in terms of what I show. I’m not looking to show something entirely new, or to shock or to force what I’m doing down anyone’s throat; it’s more a sort of conversation and using opportunities to draw out meanings.

Tell me about the Bryan Adams piece.

I’m really interested in monuments and their relationship to sculpture and statues—I actually made a proposal for the monument to Princess Diana in London.

And Indianapolis is full of monuments; it seems the city’s dominant visual language is made up of these quite somber and imposing monuments and memorials. So I wanted to make a monument here.

We looked at various musicians from around the area—the Jacksons and John Mellencamp—but I decided not to go specifically with someone from the area. So I ended up using some work I made around Bryan Adams, and though he’s definitely not from Indianapolis, it seemed to me that he had that FM-rock, big-open-sound, low-slung-guitar feel that was appropriate enough. It wasn’t necessary for the people of Indianapolis to feel the work was specifically relating to someone they knew. That’s not the way that art works anyway.

I remember when you first appeared on the scene back in the 1980s, you were making very different work; you were grouped with the ‘New British Sculptors.’ Then your work seemed to go through a number of radical changes and now …

… And now I seem to have settled down with [a style] that develops but doesn’t really seem to change drastically or dramatically.

Yes, but with this vocabulary drawn from signs and cartoon imagery, there seems to be an enormous range to work with.

Yes, that was my aim, to try to build myself something with which I could discuss anything, with one eye on someone like Hergé [the Belgian comics illustrator/writer and creator of Tintin], who developed a language that enabled him to talk about anything that he wanted.

I tend to use outdoor display methods and modern ideas of city signage and display. This language allows me to wander out of the museum. The works in the Indianapolis exhibition all use varying types of public-display language, so there are light-emitting diodes, there are road signs, there’s vinyl stuck on glass, there are big, backlit lightboxes that you might see an advertisement on.

There have been criticisms of your portrayals of women, who are often blatantly sexualized in your pictures and sculptures. There are lots of suggestive poses, short skirts, nudes. Your female figures are often depicted in the act of stripping, and you pay particular attention to their underwear as they do so. Can we talk a little bit about sexuality in your work?

It’s a difficult subject. It’s a huge element in human behavior, and it’s a huge element in terms of what looking is all about, especially when it comes to humans. Once I started drawing humans, my first intention was to use them as signs, symbols or memorials, that sort of thing, like stand-ins for people.