Julian Opie creates environments from murals, objects and digital animations. He appropriates a whole arsenal of familiar objects (architecture, human beings, animals, landscapes), reprocessing them using computer software to create schematic representations.

At Saché, Julian Opie has developed a project entitled "Driving in the Country", comprising a series of sculptures and a catalog.
Each work is based on a real, everyday situation: a car on the road, a block of buildings in the center of a town. However, the objects represented by Opie - if they are the size of real objects - lose all specificity in Opie's universe: cars become interchangeable. The same is true of buildings with their typical 60s "modernist" architecture, all set in their own environment of painted walls.
"I envisage these sculptures functioning a little like objects in an IKEA catalog. They can exist on their own, but they can be combined in different ways with other objects in the catalog, creating a wide range of possibilities... What I'm showing is a non-definitive version, and I want the viewer to be able to imagine what it might have been like in another place".
This formal simplification leads to a distancing that transforms these empirical data into simple signs through which Opie questions the conditions of reception and understanding of images.