(born in London in 1958)
Vent 2, 1989, signed and dated on the reverse: J. Opie 1989, aluminum, wood, plastic, steel, 31 x 171 x 10 cm

The work is listed on the artist’s web site under the section Sculptures 1989

Provenance:
Kohji Ogusa Gallery, Nagoya (Japan)
Galleria Primo Piano, Rome, there acquired by the present owner in 1991
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Nagoya, Julian Opie, May - June 1991, cat. p. 6 with ill.;
Rome, Galleria Primo Piano, Rome, 1991

Since 1987, Julian Opie’s sculpture has tended to conform, in certain respects to the conventions and formats that can be ascribed to groups of commercial appliances and, more recently, to the interior design of public spaces and items of domestic furniture. These works possess a sense of belonging to the real world, the world outside the art gallery, and they engender a feeling of familiarity and comfortableness when confronted. Many of these works can be grouped into family units according to their apparent function: “cabinets”, “air vents”, refrigerators and “offices” are typical examples. (….).
The kinds of spaces that these “appliance” sculptures and Opie’s larger “offices” suggest, supermarkets, airports and bureaucratic institutions, act as interfaces between the public and the world of large corporations and government.(…)
Vent 2 and H belong to the “vent” series and represent a similar kind of transitional area between the skeleton of a building, the service structure, accessible only to maintenance personnel, and the public areas where a discreet seamlessness of facture is in order. This strange distinction between “trade” and “the public” exists equally in the artwork itself, as much as in the spaces where it is displayed (…).These are not solid volumes painted in imitation of real things - like Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes- but are “painted” with their own representation.
James Roberts, from the preface to the exhibition catalogue , Nagoya, 1991