Julia Wachtel

L'Almanach 16 : Julia Wachtel

Since their emergence at the beginning of the 1980s, Julia Wachtel’s artworks have asserted a nice steadiness both in their form and production process. In general, several panels are assembled, combining images taken from current events (characters or more complex scenes) and cartoon characters similar to those that were so popular in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s; these were found on billboards, greeting cards and satirical cartoons. Celebrities and cartoon images: Warhol’s influence, summoned many times willy-nilly, is very real and straightforward here, whether in its formal aspect or when it relates to content. Wachtel seized on it at a time when, as it should be recalled, Warhol had hardly any success except for his frivolity and his presence in Society, which might as well mean no real success at all in an art industry that didn’t even truly exist as such back then.

[…] To interpret Julia Wachtel’s artworks literally would be very tricky.  These are not studious commentaries about the world; they offer an alternative to these images and their circulation, a poetic, dreamlike answer, whether they put the emphasis on their dramatic or comical aspect. They look like snippets out of sentences but they speak the language of visual arts, not the language of literature or journalism. It is a language that everybody today believes they master but that in reality demands a learning curve similar to mastering a foreign language, with its rules, grammar and stylistic figures. Even though she is celebrating her sixtieth birthday this year, Julia Wachtel perfectly masters this language; her paintings, where she displays mind-blowing skills for conveying color, are akin to the great frescoes which one day will chronicle our era to future generations, if they agree however to learn the language of art.
–Eric Troncy 
 

Julia Wachtel was born in 1956 in New York, where she lives and works today