Julia Wachtel

Julia Wachtel (b.1956) lives and work in New York and Connecticut. Wachtel’s oil, acrylic, and silkscreen-on-canvas paintings, which are drawn from popular culture, explore the impact of our image-saturated world. A figure of the Pictures Generation artists who emerged in early-1980’s New York, Wachtel’s early work mined posters of movie stars, pin-up girls, political figures, and pop music icons, as well as cartoon figures drawn from commercial greeting cards. Her current work primarily explores the vast space of the internet, a place of constantly replenishing images on a disorienting scale. Wachtel appropriates, juxtaposes and ultimately distills these images into concentrated paintings, shifting the original logic and proposing an examination of the emotional, political and aesthetic conditions of an image dominant world.