The exhibition "Image you are driving" is dedicated to the research of the British artist Julian Opie (London, UK, 1958) through the presentation of a cycle of works created between 1993 and 1996, part of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection. At the center of the exhibition project emerges the imagery of the automobile, a subject explored by Opie during the 1990s and early 2000s with its characteristic trait based on impersonality and formal simplification straddling pop and minimalist styles. After graduating from Goldsmith College in London in 1982, Opie began working in the New British sculpture, a movement interested in developing a new relationship between sculpture and urban culture through the use of waste materials, in a clear reaction to minimalist tendencies and conceptual.

Over the years Opie inaugurates a formal lexicon inspired by childhood games, but also by the nascent video games industry. His favorite subjects become the means of transport, the people, the landscapes that characterize the contemporary metropolis, stylized and traced in clear backgrounds. Opie's imaginaries are confronted with the visual ideology of the society of goods and services. His sculptures are presented as standardized products waiting for a metaphorical public consumption, offerings on which to project one's desires and aspirations. In Opie's work we find echoes of the society described by the anthropologist Marc Augé in his famous publication “Non-places. Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity” (1992). Augé sees the users of the contemporary landscape no longer as inhabitants in the traditional sense of the term, but rather as passers-by. Non-places are those anthropic spaces dedicated to circulation and consumption, anonymous places frequented by lonely people in which no social relations are produced, such as motorways, stations, airports. These infrastructures, due to their characteristic provisional and transitory dimension, represent the condition of contemporary individualism, alienation and extraneousness.

Opie's artistic research has been interested in these contradictions of contemporary society, building a visual universe capable of representing them with a detached ironic gaze. Attentive to the new frontiers of marketing visuality and the first representations in CGI (computer-generated imagery), Opie has imagined a reality cut out for the individual, a world that can only be experienced through the subjective vision of the spectator. The exhibition “Julian Opie. Imagine you are driving” was organized on the occasion of the 90th anniversary celebrations of MAUTO – National Automobile Museum.