Julia Wachtel: Return to Content a/b

Julia Wachtel's oil, acrylic, and silkscreen-on-canvas paintings draw on popular culture to explore the impact of our image-saturated world. She is a prominent figure among the Pictures Generation artists who emerged in early-1980s New York, brought together by a shared interest in the proliferation of images across popular culture, mass media, and advertising.

Wachtel has continuously refined her formal vocabulary while maintaining a strong conceptual foundation, never relinquishing her enduring interest in hyperreality. Wachtel's image compositions operate as a loop of desire and self-confirmation. She appropriates, juxtaposes, and ultimately distills images into concentrated paintings, shifting their original logic and inviting an examination of the emotional, political, and aesthetic conditions of an image-driven world. All in all, they stage a flattened emotional register in which nostalgia, aspiration, and anxiety coexist in a disquieting equilibrium.

While Wachtel’s early work mined posters of movie stars, pin-up girls, political figures, pop music icons, or cartoon characters, her recent work explores the vast terrain of the internet, a space of constantly replenished images on a disorienting scale, further amplified by the rise of AI-generated imagery.

Over the years, Wachtel's work has been exhibited extensively internationally and integrated into the renowned collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO), Geneva; and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne.

›Return to Content a/b‹ opens at Klemm's in Berlin 10 SEP and at Jahn & Jahn in Munich 17 SEP. Both exhibitions will be accompanied by a text by Jens Asthoff.