LONDON.- Hospital Rooms announced the participation of Julian Opie in our latest project at Eileen Skellern 1, Maudsley Hospital at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Eileen Skellern 1 is a psychiatric intensive care unit that provides semi-secure psychiatric and intensive hospital care for women who have severe and on-going mental illnesses.

Julian Opie has created a series of compositions of birds that will be installed directly to the walls of the unit. He will join Paresha Amin, Aimee Mullins, Harold Offeh, Nengi Omuku, Tamsin Relly and Tim A Shaw, who have also begun creating bespoke and museum quality artwork for Eileen Skellern 1.

The project is funded by Arts Council England and through the generosity of Hospital Rooms’ friends and donors. We are also grateful to Colart who will supply high quality artist materials for the project through their brand Liquitex.

“We are really excited to be working with Hospital Rooms and a team of leading artists. Psychiatric Intensive Care Units support patients at a time when they are acutely unwell and at their most vulnerable. The experience of patients and staff in these units is hugely affected by the aesthetic and design of the physical environment. This innovative project will bring together patients, clinicians and artists to co-produce museum quality artwork. Using the power of art to empower women in mental health crises and promote recovery will lead to a sustained positive change in the way we care for our patients.” --Dr Faisil Sethi, Consultant Psychiatrist; Ronnie Adeduro, Clinical Services Lead; Rebecca Davies, Occupational Therapist. Eileen Skellern 1, Maudsley Hospital

With public commissions from Seoul to New York, Luxembourg to Zurich and an uninterrupted flow of large museum exhibitions internationally, the work of Julian Opie is known throughout the world. Opie’s distinctive formal language is instantly recognisable and reflects his artistic preoccupation with the idea of representation, and the means by which images are perceived and understood.

“Everything you see is a trick of the light.” Opie writes. “Light bouncing into your eye, light casting shadows, creating depth, shapes, colours. Turn off the light and it’s all gone. We use vision as a means of survival and it’s essential to take it for granted in order to function, but awareness allows us to look at looking and by extension look at ourselves and be aware of our presence. Drawing, drawing out the way that process feels and works brings the awareness into the present and into the real world, the exterior world.”

Always exploring different techniques both cutting edge and ancient, Opie plays with ways of seeing through reinterpreting the vocabulary of everyday life; his reductive style evokes both a visual and spatial experience of the world around us. Taking influence from classical portraiture, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Japanese woodblock prints, as well as public signage, information boards and traffic signs, the artist connects the clean visual language of modern life, with the fundamentals of art history.