Julia Wachtel
°1956, New York (US) – lives and works in New York (US)
Julia Wachtel focuses her artistic practice on the visual language of mass culture. In her paintings of the 1980s and 1990s, Wachtel inserted grotesque, irritating cartoon characters — popular with the middle class in the 1960s and 1970s – into the “readymade” lexicon of mainstream magazine and newspaper photographic images. In this way Wachtel appropriated this popular imagery to critique an increasingly media-saturated society. By juxtaposing these painted cartoon characters with images of pop stars, nuclear power plants and masks from so-called primitive cultures, Wachtel’s work also tackles the function and significance of images in modern society and the socio-political landscape of our time.
Recent solo exhibitions by Julia Wachtel include Kunsthalle, Bergen; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Centre d’Art Contemporain, Troyes. Her work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including Selections from Absolut Collection (curated by Haim Steinbach) at The Artist’s Institute, New York; ICA, London; Kunsthalle, Bern; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Saatchi Gallery, London; and Le Magasin, Grenoble.
Wachtel’s work is also represented in many important international collections, such as MoMA, New York; Whitney Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland.
Julia Wachtel is represented by the following galleries;
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Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York
You can also see more of Julia Wachtel’s work on her own website.