Due At an airport near you - 3D takes off as fine art

5 April 2012

While 3D is proving a dead duck on film for the umpteenth time round, it seems the technique is only just taking off in the world of fine art.

Jeff Robb, a pioneer of holography in the Eighties and Nineties, will soon be creating lenticular artworks - where a series of images under a series of lenses add sculptural depth and movement to a picture as the viewer passes by - for Versace and Gatwick airport.

Lenticular images by Julian Opie, also known for his cover design for Blur's Best Of album and his LED sculptures, are among his best-selling works at the Alan Cristea Gallery. And Slovenia-born, London-trained fashion photographer Matja Tancic has been experimenting with "anaglyph" 3D photography - the kind where red and blue "shadow" images only merge when one wears a special pair of glasses - and selling the resulting prints for £700 a pop at Kensington's Richard Young Gallery.

John Briley, Gatwick's new head of projects, contacted Robb after seeing his mixed media 3D landscapes and his luminous, drifting 3D nudes - shot in the famous water tank of Pinewood studios - at Mauger Modern Art in Pimlico. "It was as if he was voicing what was in my head," says Briley, who is working with Robb towards creating moving 3D artworks beside travelators in the airport's North Terminal. The artist is also working with Donatella Versace to create versions of his floating nudes "with a Versace twist" for the fashion label's stores worldwide in 2012.

"I'm trying to cross the barrier between painting, photography and sculpture," says Robb. "It's completely undiscovered territory but I'm trying to push the boundaries of it as a medium."

Already, he says, his works, costing up to £10,000, are bought by people who also collect Canalettos: "The most common feedback is that people feel they are entering a different world - the picture is a porthole you can fall into."

Alan Cristea, owner of the eponymous Cork Street gallery that sells Opie's lenticular images, says of the technique: "Viewers love it because it is their movement across the picture which animates the picture and therefore they become part of the process. Julian Opie loves it because he is using street technology."

Tancic, meanwhile, says that the lo-fi aspect of red/blue "anaglyph" technology appealed when he first started taking 3D fashion photographs, not least because the colour "halos" add a graphic dimension to the pictures if viewed without 3D glasses. He says viewers are often intrigued by his images, and take longer to look at them than at boring old two-dimensional art. Like Robb, he feels the potential of the medium is yet to be fully tapped, and at the moment it's a labour of love, as creating 3D images is expensive, time consuming and challenging.

"But if it was easy," he says, "everyone would do it."

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