Julian Opie’s Winter

The exhibition which opens this week at London’s Alan Cristea Gallery, shows 75 new works, all based on wintery scenes.

The Winter series follows on from his Summer pieces, which were shown in Opie’s Lisson Gallery show last June.

The 75 prints are an extension of Opie’s 2012 film Winter, and each piece represents one of 75 sequential steps on a circular winter walk through the French countryside.

The fruits of Opie’s perambulations form a peaceful series of multi-layered images, which Alan Cristea Gallery says are informed by such disparate influences as Google Maps Street View and 17^th century Dutch landscape painting.

Each image draws on a photograph taken by Opie, which he then digitally manipulated, drawing under and over the original image. The final pictures were laminated to glass, and create strikingly modern yet traditional-looking depiction of the French countryside.

According to the gallery, Opie’s chosen medium of lamination to glass ‘references the architectural use of glass generally within the public realm and specifically within in Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5’, and the curation of the works to surround the viewer within the space will create a panorama ‘that is at once a pastoral landscape and a slick architectural surface’.

Julian Opie, Winter runs from 14 February – 16 March at Alan Cristea Gallery, 34 Cork Street, London W1