reviews

  • Julian Opie

    Hayward Gallery

    Imagine you are climbing, 1992, is a tall white-painted, wooden arrangement of shelves. The invitation to ascend, as in much of Julian Opie’s work, is an injunction to look rather than to take direct action. You can look, too, down the avenues that separate the elements of the 1991 modular works but, unlike Bruce Nauman’s corridor, they are too narrow to allow passage. The space occupied by the work is no more physically accessible than that of the earlier glass-and-screen wall-partition boxes, which can be seen into but not entered. However much Opie’s work seems, in Michael Newman’s words, to

    Read more