Located permanently on the western median strip on St Kilda Road – Melbourne’s most celebrated boulevard – Australian birds. is Julian Opie’s largest LED based public artwork to date.
Australian birds. was inspired by Opie’s father’s stories of growing up in Australia, as well as the artist’s own experiences of spotting native birds on his travels around Australia. For this work pigeons, gulls, ducks, swamp hens, herons and ibis were filmed in Melbourne before being drawn in the artist’s signature style and then animated. Unperturbed by the passing traffic, they graze on the nature strips along St Kilda Road, comfortable in their casual ownership of the street.
Opie observes: ‘Many birds share our living space but, thanks to flight, are largely free to ignore us. It seems to me that animals are generally underrated and ignored in such a terrible way – in life and art.’
Julian Opie (b. 1958, London, UK) is a sculptor, painter, printmaker and installation artist. Between 1972 and 1982 he attended Goldsmiths College where he studied under Michael Craig-Martin. During the early 1980s Opie became associated with a generation of sculptors known as New British Sculpture, a group that included artists Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Wentworth and Tony Cragg. In recent years he has received major commissions for murals for public spaces and buildings, including Lindo Wing, St Mary’s Hospital, London (2012) and Central Station, Milan (2003). In 1995 Opie was awarded the Sargent Fellowship at the British School in Rome and the Spanish Art Critics Association (AECA) Award, ARCOmadrid, in 2015. Opie was part of the 1998 Sydney Biennale and the subject of a solo retrospective exhibition at NGV International in 2018, curated by Dr Simon Maidment.
Photo © Tobias Titz
Julian Opie
Australian Birds., 2020
29 x double sided LED screens
Commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria and the City of Melbourne
City of Melbourne Art and Heritage Collection