Julia Wachtel: Return to Content a/b

Julia Wachtel's first comprehensive solo exhibition in Germany presents oil, acrylic, and silkscreen-on-canvas paintings exploring image-saturation and popular culture. About Klemm's is pleased to present ›Return to Content a/b‹, Julia Wachtel's (b. 1956, lives and works in New York and Connecticut) first comprehensive solo exhibition in Germany. A collaborative project between Jahn & Jahn and Klemm's, ›Return to Content a/b‹ offers an expansive overview of Wachtel's practice across Munich and Berlin. 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. Read more Toggle Painting