Julia Wachtel

Julia Wachtel (; born 1956) is a contemporary American painter associated with the Pictures Generation. Since the late 1970s, her work has been based in the appropriation of imagery from mass media and popular culture. Starting with magazines and greeting cards, she later turned to the internet, social media, and clip-art for her source material. Her signature style involves silkscreening these elements onto canvas alongside hand-painted panels. Wachtel often builds multi-panel compositions that pair cartoon and other commercial imagery with photographs of pop stars, political figures, post-industrial landscapes, and media spectacles. Flash Art writes that her style creates "a new disrupted space" for imagery, compelling viewers to recontextualize the media they consume on a daily basis. Comparing her to Mike Kelley, Frieze describes Wachtel's work as a "darkly subversive use of popular culture and objects as a form of social commentary."

Wachtel's work is held in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Blanton Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, MAMCO Geneva, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, The Phillips Collection,

Life and education

Wachtel was born in New York City in 1956. She attended Middlebury College, earning a BA in art, before studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where her teachers included Vito Acconci, Joseph Kosuth, Joan Jonas. She then studied at the Whitney Independent Study Program.

For a period of about ten years beginning in the early 2000s, Wachtel stepped back from her active exhibition schedule while raising her two children as a single mother and working as production manager of the UK edition of Vanity Fair magazine, based in New York. The piece combined two Super 8 films, one of couples combing one another's hair on a bluff and another of a hand assembling a face from vinyl cutouts. These films were set to fragmented soap opera dialogue. Wachtel later described this structure as a "linear collage," built on rhythm and juxtaposition rather than narrative. In 1984, she had her first solo exhibition at Gallery Nature Morte where she showed a series of vertical paintings combining images lifted from folk art and pop culture.

According to Bob Nickas, "Wachtel's major statement from the mid-'80s is her series Emotional Appeal (1986), a dozen paintings that alternate in their hanging from cartoon to primitive figures."

Later work (2010s–present)

In 2013, a solo show at Vilma Gold in London, Post Culture served as a miniature survey of her career. In 2014, the Cleveland Museum of Art organized her second solo institutional show at the museum's Transformer Station. A catalogue was published by Yale University Press, with essays by Reto Thüring and Quinn Latimer. One painting contrasted Kim Jong-un with South Korean pop star Psy, whose "Gangnam Style" was then the most-viewed video in YouTube history; another placed a silkscreened Hillary Clinton alongside painted prehistoric Venus sculptures.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Wachtel began making short videos, pulling clips from television and commercials into looped sequences featured in the online exhibition Passing Time. In early 2021, Wachtel had a solo exhibition, Fulfillment, at Helena Anrather in New York. Writing in the New York Times, Will Heinrich described Wachtel's paintings as portraying "an alternate reality, one in which America's disintegrating public discourse is replaced by the narrow but reliable certainties of art." In 2022, she presented Believe at Super Dakota in Brussels, including the painting "Airport", a large-scale multi-panel work depicting an airport terminal filled with directional signage and embedded stock-image watermarks.

Exhibitions

Wachtel's work has been exhibited in the Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Cleveland Museum of Art, Musée d'art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO Geneva), Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Contemporary Austin, Walker Art Center, Albertina Modern (Vienna), Bergen Kunsthall, Le Consortium (Dijon), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Migros Museum (Zurich), Saatchi Gallery (London), among others. In addition, she received an award from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.