Name: View Of The Mountains From The Nihon Alps Salada Road
Brand: Julian Opie
Rating: 5 (233 reviews)

Track auction value trend

Julian Opie's View Of The Mountains From The Nihon Alps Salada Road (signed), a mixed media artwork from 2009, is estimated to be worth between £2,150 and £3,200. This piece has an auction history of two sales since its entry to the market in December 2016. The hammer price over the last five years has ranged from £1,870 in November 2019 to £1,870 in November 2019. This work is part of a limited edition of 50.

Auction Date

Auction House

Location

Hammer Price

Return to Seller

Buyer Paid

September 2023

Phillips London

United Kingdom

December 2016

Phillips London

United Kingdom

Meaning & Analysis

Taken from Julian Opie’s Japanese Landscapes series from 2009, View Of The Mountains From The Nihon Alps Salada Road shows a mountainous landscape in the distance, with a road, lake and pond weed in the foreground. The image is depicted from a low perspective, as the viewer has to peer through the pondweed to see the view.

Closely referencing Japanese art history, Opie uses strips of calligraphy on either side of the landscape to make clear his inspiration from the woodblock prints of Utagawa Hiroshige. Interestingly, Opie incorporates these strips into the scene itself, showing the pond weed covering the strip on the left and the strip on the right is reflected in the water.

Created using computer drawing programmes to manipulate digital photographs, these prints were inspired on a trip taken by the artist around Mount Fuji in Japan. These landscapes were originally displayed as a series of animations based on double and triple LCD screens, representative of the way in which Opie tries to defy traditional art boundaries through his work. Opie has spoken of this saying, “Our attitude towards art history, towards schools, styles, and ‘isms’, was quite aggressive. We wanted to manipulate them, to use whatever style we wished.”