UTA Artist Space will present Thirsty for Myself, an exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Julia Wachtel. This is the artist's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, despite many of her paintings using images culled from Hollywood film and television.
Wachtel is best known for collecting images from pop culture and the public domain and repurposing them into paintings encoded with new meanings. She scrambles and reconfigures the language of image to powerfully yet playfully address urgent political, social, and environmental issues. On view in the exhibition are 13 mostly new and previously unseen works, continuing Wachtel's tradition of layering and juxtaposing cartoons, logos, photographs, and stock images, and dividing them into segments that establish a dialogue with the formal languages of Modernism and Postmodernism.
One of the exhibition's central paintings, Thirsty for Myself (2019), addresses the extreme pervasiveness of anxiety and narcissism in contemporary American culture. Two cartoon figures stand apart at opposite ends of the canvas while also chaotically layered on top of one another, both caught in a storm of hearts that look akin to social media "likes". This painting is technically unique for the artist and is the first time she has screen printed directly on hand painted panels.
In Marine Park (2019), Wachtel uses an image found from a commercial Chinese website depicting a plastic indoor activity zone superimposed on top of an image of the seaside. She was drawn to the irony of plastic-the enemy of our global ecosystem-being overlaid on this natural beach scene. Paired with this are two images of Chuck E. Cheese, who is arguably of the same colorful, commercial world fragmented in multiple panels. Wachtel's method of repeating and overlapping the image in this painting creates a mutation that challenges the coherence of a fixed image. Another painting, Hole (2019), is a response to the lack of political will to address the overwhelming array of critical issues confronting us, illustrated by two white male figures burying their heads in their surroundings. Baby Blue (2019) is an intentional perversion of language; there is no blue in the painting and Wachtel instead addresses commonplace gender color coding.
The exhibition will also include two earlier paintings from Wachtel's practice. The largest work at 5-foot tall and 13-foot wide is Stone (2015), which tackles America's deep-rooted negative racial stereotypes and corporate marketing campaigns; Kentucky Fried Chicken's Colonel Sanders is depicted next to a screen printed young black man throwing a stone in a comparison to the biblical tale of David and Goliath. In another painting, Communication (2016), Wachtel uses stills from American Cold War comedy TV series Get Smart as a pointed take on our current parallel political climate.
In celebration of Thirsty for Myself, UTA Artist Space is proud to collaborate with New York fashion line Lingua Franca and artware editions company Prospect to produce a collection of limited edition products, available in-person at UTA Artist Space and on UTA Artist Space's website.
