Gagosian is pleased to announce It, an exhibition of new paintings by Jamian Juliano-Villani. It is the artist’s debut at the gallery and opens at the 541 West 24th Street location in New York on March 16.
Juliano-Villani’s irreverent artistry is fueled by her obsession with consumer culture and social taboo, resulting in a mirage of distorted iconography. Augmenting this strategy with an awareness of representational painting’s history, she produces images derived from a personal archive of books, magazines, and photographs, as well as from online sources. Using acrylic, airbrush, and oil painting techniques, she incorporates fragments of her own writing and elements of the work of other artists such as Danish painter and sculptor Ovartaci (1894–1985). Juliano-Villani’s work also refers to cartoons, addressing racial, sexual, and social stereotypes through their mischievous wit and unsettling ambiguity. For her, these kinds of images are “democratic, based on impulse and speed; much like a sniper with a vision.”
The paintings in It see Juliano-Villani pursuing strategies of appropriation and reference that resonate with the work of artists such as Richard Prince, Sturtevant, and particularly Mike Kelley, with whom she shares a fondness for abject and profane imagery. She also cites Robert Gober’s interest in confronting the viewer with suppressed or partially hidden memories. Juliano-Villani adds new conceptual strata to these various influences and prioritizes the communication of ideas over the honing of any specific aesthetic, resulting in an “arranged marriage” of non sequitur form and content. Any hint of grandeur is contrasted with a “dose of reality” provided by everyday commercial iconography.
