Throughout her work, Julia Wachtel pulls imagery from the internet to create multivalent dichotomies and commentary on climate change and the environment, pop culture, and consumerism. The seven screenprinted layers in Accumulation echo Wachtel’s painting process; the repeating oil refinery imagery stems from her recently completed, not yet exhibited painting Glare v.2, 2023. Wachtel enjoyed a very collaborative process with the Powerhouse Arts Printshop team, building bars of pastel colors to provide a support system for the vibrating screenprinted layers of refineries and repeating “bling baby.”

Images of the PHA Print team during production by Xavier Petromelis

artist bio

Julia Wachtel (b. 1956, New York, NY) lives and works 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 associated with 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. Selected exhibitions include The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; The Whitney Museum Of American Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; MAMCO, Geneva; Bergen Kunsthalle, Norway; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Le Consortium, France; Migros Museum, Zurich; Zabludowicz, London; ICA, London; Kunsthalle, Bern. Wachtel’s work is included in international collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; MOCA, Los Angeles; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; FRAC Normandie; Cleveland Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels; and the Zabludowicz Collection, London.